K0SWE Blog

This week I had a work trip to the south Bay Area in California, and took an HT to try my hand at making some local repeater contacts there. I had a couple of nice rag-chews. I learned a lot more about using the Anytone D878 in VFO mode and with front-panel programming; I get spoiled around home having the luxury of pre-programming everything with software and transferring codeplugs. I also took a new ZUMspot hotspot, but didn't have much opportunity to use it. At the office I had a great view of the local repeaters from a high floor and didn't really need the hotspot; at the hotel, the WiFi had a captive portal and I didn't have a good way to connect it.

Today I helped a team from RMHAM to introduce some students from JFK High School to amateur radio ahead of our potential ARISS contact. We did a quick lecture as an overview of amateur radio, then took the students out for radio direction finding, commonly known in the hobby as foxhunting. The foxhunt was meant to teach the kids about directional antennas and give them a hands-on activity. This was my first experience with foxhunting, and I really enjoyed it. However, I wasn't very skilled at guiding my group of students. I'll have to practice this later.

I had a chance this weekend to install new antennas: an NMO mount for my truck (in addition to the car I did a few months ago) and a VHF/UHF J-pole in the attic. The NMO install went a little smoother in the truck than it did in the car, I suppose due to experience, but also because the larger cab and larger headliner meant I didn't feel the need to take both B and C pillar trim panels off, just one side of the truck. The attic antenna went well enough, although my attic has a shorter peak than I remembered, only about 5 feet. The Arrow OSJ 146/440 I bought barely fit. However, it's performing really well: hooked up to my new Kenwood TM-D710G, I'm getting APRS packets from up to 110 miles away! I'm not even in that advantageous of a location. (I neglected to check if those were via digipeater, but regardless, I'm happy!) I tested out the new D710/attic antenna combo by trying to work the ISS APRS digipeater. It was a little challenging to figure out the different...

I've been looking at mobile radios for a while, but the difficult thing about it is that there's no radio that does everything. I've been looking at: VHF/UHF radios that support digital voice modes like DMR, or  VHF/UHF radios that include a TNC and APRS, or  all-band radios that do HF in addition to VHF/UHF, or  HF-only rigs.  Choosing one means giving up on the other modes, or running multiple radios which multiplies cost and complexity. After much humming and hawing, I decided that packet is one of the things I'd most like to master (even though the prevalence of packet is supposedly much reduced from its heyday), so I chose what seems to be the most popular dual-bander with a TNC. The Kenwood TM-D710G puts out 50W on the 2m and 70cm bands, which is an order of magnitude more power than the HTs I've been using. It has a well-integrated TNC which supports APRS (with built-in GPS for location), and also more general packet/AX.25 communications, even...