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Motronic posted:It would seem that one of the big deals is that is support P25 Phase II. While I don't regularly pay attention to new scanners, I couldn't find anything that did phase II the last time I checked several months ago (my county is upgrading to a 700mHz P25 Phase II system). Phase 2 is nice, but the PSR-800 was released around 3 years ago and supported it. These scanners are just Uniden catching up. People were hoping they would add something more of value than a smartphone app and Wifi (i.e. new decoding capability).
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Nov 19, 2013 16:34
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Dijkstra posted:Phase 2 is nice, but the PSR-800 was released around 3 years ago and supported it. ??? Motorola hasn't even been shipping Phase 2 gear for 3 years. I supposed they designed it to the published standard. I'm surprised I didn't come across that one when I was looking. Apparently Radio Shack rebranded it as the PRO-18 iScan, which they don't appear to carry anymore.
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Nov 19, 2013 16:58
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Motronic posted:??? Motorola hasn't even been shipping Phase 2 gear for 3 years. I supposed they designed it to the published standard. Moto had X2 TDMA, which was their version of Phase 2... It was installed in Loudon county, VA and a few other places starting in 2010. The PSR-800 decoded Moto X2 Stock. The final Phase 2 accepted standard is slightly different but close enough that a small firmware update in the PSR-800 allowed both of them to be decoded properly. Moto was banking on X2 becoming the standard I guess but it wasn't ratified as such, so GRE released a firmware update to take care of both. Point is, Uniden had an easy opportunity to actually add decoding functionality not seen in a scanner before but they dropped the ball and put in shiny iFeatures instead. Which is what Uniden does now I guess. Hard-core geeks will wait to see what Whistler does with GRE's IP while folks who want to stream the Police Dispatch to their iDevice will buy the Uniden then bitch in 3 years when their local PD goes TRBO.
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Nov 19, 2013 17:17
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So I bought a Baofeng UV-5RA a couple months ago. I've found the frequencies I can use without a license but I kind of want to do more. Would it even be worth it with my cheap little radio to get a license? e.pilot fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Nov 25, 2013 |
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Nov 25, 2013 00:16
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e.pie posted:So I bought a Baofeng UV-5RA a couple months ago. I've found the frequencies I can use without a license but I kind of want to do more. Absolutely. They are cheap little radios, but they do nearly all the same things that a $200+ HT would do. Don't feel like that's a limitation.
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Nov 25, 2013 03:05
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Motronic posted:Absolutely. They are cheap little radios, but they do nearly all the same things that a $200+ HT would do. Don't feel like that's a limitation. Cool, guess I'll have to find a local testing place. How hard is the test, mostly common sense stuff?
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Nov 25, 2013 03:07
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e.pie posted:Cool, guess I'll have to find a local testing place. Try a practice test like those from AA9PW. Study some so you don't waste $15 and a Saturday morning.
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Nov 25, 2013 03:10
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e.pie posted:Cool, guess I'll have to find a local testing place. It's not common sense, but it's not all that advanced. If you have any sort of technical background you'll find getting your technician (or even general) to be quite easy. Next exam lookup: http://www.arrl.org/find-an-amateur-radio-license-exam-session Study materials: http://www.kb6nu.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/2010_Tech_Study_Guide.pdf Practice tests: http://hamexam.org/ If the study materials or practice tests don't suit your liking there are many other options available for free online.
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Nov 25, 2013 03:24
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Motronic posted:It's not common sense, but it's not all that advanced. If you have any sort of technical background you'll find getting your technician (or even general) to be quite easy. Thanks, looks like I got some studyin' to do. 
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Nov 25, 2013 03:40
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I've started to notice some nasty EMI on 40 and 10 meters. I think I've got two sources of interference. The first is an intermittent, random clicking, which is probably some equipment arcing somewhere nearby. Time to brush up my RDF skills  The other is a fairly persistent hum. I've shut off all the power in the house, and I hear both. My question is, could my antenna being roughly the same height and parallel to the power line drop to my house be causing the hum? It's perhaps 20 feet away. Unfortunately the power drop from the pole in my backyard cuts straight through the length of my lot, and my G5RV is in pretty much the only place I can manage an antenna on my lot. The noiseblanker on my radio handles most of the noise, but it's pretty annoying.
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Nov 25, 2013 04:52
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manero posted:could my antenna being roughly the same height and parallel to the power line drop to my house be causing the hum? It's perhaps 20 feet away. It may not be the cause of these particular issues if they are new, but that's really, really bad antenna placement. No chance of getting one end even 10 or 20 feet in another direction so it's not paralleling the lines? Dropping one or both sides into an inverted vee? At 20 feet away I wouldn't be surprised if you are drat near close enough to be coupling to the power lines.
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Nov 25, 2013 05:03
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Motronic posted:It may not be the cause of these particular issues if they are new, but that's really, really bad antenna placement. The antenna (and power) run north-south through my lot, with the south end lower and closer and the north end higher and further away, but roughly following the height of the power line. I may try dropping the north end and shooting for an inverted vee. I'd love to put something on my roof but it's pitched pretty steeply, and the guy who owned my house in the 80's actually fell off it and died 
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Nov 25, 2013 05:45
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I studied for one hour the day before and one hour the morning of the exam and missed 3/35. It's easy.
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Nov 27, 2013 00:35
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I'd like to build a couple really small APRS Igates. There's only one and it's right in the centre of town. I'm off to the east and another ham I know is north. I seen that raspberrypi version on hackaday, that interests me. Anybody try anything like this? Going for small and simple and hopefully cost effective. And also, any recommendations on (homemade) antennas for this setup?
SiB fucked around with this message at 08:39 on Dec 1, 2013 |
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Dec 1, 2013 08:27
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SiB posted:And also, any recommendations on (homemade) antennas for this setup? 2 meters? Coaxial dipoles are super easy to make and can be stealthy. Just strip back about 19 inches of outer coax shield, work the shield back over the coax (away from the free end), and weatherproof it all somehow. You can stick it inside a 1" PVC pipe and put that up in the air, staple it to the side of the house, whatever. They're not that picky.
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Dec 3, 2013 18:00
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I passed technician and general earlier this evening.  I probably wouldn't have actually broken down and gotten the study materials without this thread, so thanks, everyone.I'd post a call sign for the OP, but I don't have one yet...and that thing's going to be linked to my actual name. With my other posting habits, that could end poorly.
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Dec 4, 2013 08:33
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quote:It has been reported and confirmed that the world's largest amateur antenna, the 3-element 160 meter Yagi at OH8X, has collapsed in a recent storm. The Radio Arcala team is preparing a report that will be available in a few days.  
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Dec 5, 2013 22:07
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DXers who have been there and talked to Martti Lane (Radio Arcala founder) say that that antenna was built as more of an engineering challenge than anything. It's really amazing that it stayed up in the arctic circle as long as it did. Supposedly their phased 160m vertical array puts out a better signal anyway. G7VJR (the guy who runs Clublog) was invited to OH8X and wrote this about his visit. Dijkstra fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Dec 5, 2013 |
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Dec 5, 2013 22:45
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But there is something to be said about an an antenna so big people want to base jump off of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvp_NMaskds
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Dec 6, 2013 02:42
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I finally found my call sign listed on the FCC ULS today (), so I used that to make a QRZ account. Unfortunately, my call sign's not in their data base yet (understandably), so I get a little message that says, "You are not registered as a Ham Member. In order to be a Ham Member, your user name must match a listed callsign in our database." Is the fact that I registered for QRZ with my call sign before it was in their database going to cause problems? 
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Dec 11, 2013 19:02
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poeticoddity posted:I finally found my call sign listed on the FCC ULS today ( It should catch up tonight when they do their daily ULS download. Get your LOTW and Echolink stuff set up too. You'll need time for those to process/get things mailed to you/etc. In fact, LoTW is the important one, as you can use that to auth most of the other stuff. And you'll have to wait to get a card in the mail from them. http://www.arrl.org/instructions
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Dec 11, 2013 19:26
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Dijkstra posted:DXers who have been there and talked to Martti Lane (Radio Arcala founder) say that that antenna was built as more of an engineering challenge than anything. It's really amazing that it stayed up in the arctic circle as long as it did. Supposedly their phased 160m vertical array puts out a better signal anyway. Neat read. Still a shame about the tower though. "It is suspected that automation designed to enable the array to find its most comfortable position in high winds somehow locked up and caused the structure to corkscrew. "  http://dx-world.net/2013/oh8x-tower-collapse/
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Dec 11, 2013 21:52
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Motronic posted:It should catch up tonight when they do their daily ULS download. Thanks! In case this saves anyone else who's getting started some hassle in the future, on ubuntu derivatives the application names for the TQSL stuff you need are 'tqsl' and 'tqslcert', but the line to install it is 'apt-get installtrustedqsl', which took me longer than it should have to find.
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Dec 13, 2013 07:08
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I've ordered the parts needed for my own D-Star hotspot, planning to use an old IC-25E I've just added the 9600 baud I/O ports today, hopefully connecting to the right points should be sufficient, it was listed in a list of fairly compatible radios without any special notes and RX looks decent on my oscilloscope (a digital waveform is visible at the discriminator, unlike after filtering where it's nearly unrecognizable). I've tuned it to run at about 10W instead of 25W, with the low power tuned to about 200mW, hopefully it won't destroy itself at that power level. Any suggestions for antenna type to use? It'll be a 2 meter hotspot to cover a large area, there's a fairly large shadow area between me, the nearest 70cm repeater and the nearest 2m repeater that I'm hoping to cover. Location is not great, 4th floor in an apartment complex with one floor above me so I have a floors worth of concrete around me in three directions. My current antenna is a 1/2 wave mobile whip, my alternatives currently are 1/4 wave mobile whip and a large discone antenna mostly suited for scanning but supposedly low SWR on 2m. I was considering buying/building a normal dipole, or perhaps even a 2 element LFA-Q beam like Innovantennas sells, since I'm most interested in covering the northern area... Assuming this works I might be able to put it up at the local NRRL groups repeater site/club house or on the roof at work, but for now I need to work with what I've got, suggestions?
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Dec 27, 2013 23:54
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I know this isn't helpful but.....boooooooo D-Star. Why are you doing this? Do you have a large local user base? If not I'd suggest promoting an open technology (and don't start on me with "D-Star is open! You can do everything except....oh, right....voice...because the codec is licensed").
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Dec 28, 2013 01:35
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Currently I'm the user base. Also know there are a few people who have D-Star capable radios but don't use the functionality since there's no local repeater that can be reached reliably. Doing a tiny bit of guerilla marketing around my hometown's repeater being set up got enough people active on D-Star that most of the newly licensed hams stated that D-Star was the must-have feature for their next HT/mobile. I don't really see any proper alternatives for a 2m simplex gateway anyway, there's already Echolink over the main analog repeater for the area and that's barely ever used. That being said, the DV-RPTRv2LT I'm using has no AMBE chip in it so with a firmware hack could probably relay something other than AMBE data for the voice channel should there be a consensus that D-Star is evil later.
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Dec 28, 2013 13:16
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Are you able to like stick a little something out the window and screw it to the frame maybe, or are you strictly indoor antenna only?
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Dec 28, 2013 16:44
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I have a balcony antenna right now, the 1/2 wave whip, but one thing I'm considering is mounting a dipole or perhaps making a Slim Jim antenna in a thin plastic tube, and screwing that to the wall. I have a bit of wall that doesn't have a lot of metal nearby so that might work. An antenna that would work reasonably well close to a wall and can be painted would be excellent since it wouldn't be particularly visible.
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Dec 28, 2013 18:16
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longview posted:Currently I'm the user base. Also know there are a few people who have D-Star capable radios but don't use the functionality since there's no local repeater that can be reached reliably. Doesn't the dv rptr just repeat everything digitally without caring what the data actually is? I always assumed that out of the box they'd do FreeDV and not give a drat? Are you going to be using a duplexer?
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Dec 28, 2013 19:17
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Motronic posted:I know this isn't helpful but.....boooooooo D-Star. D-Star is awesome and far from the first or last ham technology that is proprietary. It's a $20 chip you have to buy to handle voice encoding which doesn't seem particularly onerous.
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Dec 28, 2013 20:24
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Crankit posted:Doesn't the dv rptr just repeat everything digitally without caring what the data actually is? I always assumed that out of the box they'd do FreeDV and not give a drat? Are you going to be using a duplexer? No VHF duplexer, my apartment isn't big enough My system will be a simplex gateway to the DCS network, in my hometown we had this system for a long time before the repeater was set up.If FreeDV is DV bitstream compliant but puts some open source codec instead of the AMBE codec then it would work with no major modifications except obviously I'd have to connect to other FreeDV repeaters. The way it works as far as I can work out is to just demodulate the GMSK stream, and transfer that into whatever DCS room is linked, the repeater(s) at the other end modulates it to GMSK and sends it without touching the content. For a duplex repeater the same happens except it's also repeated on the transmitter. There's a routing system as well, to handle call-sign routing, linking commands and so on but that's the basic principle for voice communication. The repeater we set up uses a dv-rptr card to act as a repeater with full duplex, and there's a simplex gateway like what I'm setting up that connects to the repeater in-band on the same frequencies that the normal users connect to relay internet traffic, this works the same way as a remote fed echolink gateway.
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Dec 29, 2013 00:46
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 Norwegian special prefixes LI and LJ will be available for 2014, celebrating the bicentennial of the Norwegian constitution. If I get to do some SOTA activations I'll make a special QSL card for that. The NRRL is planning a special award as well.
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Dec 30, 2013 16:30
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Is there an RTL-SDR thread around here somewhere?
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Jan 4, 2014 23:05
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revmoo posted:Is there an RTL-SDR thread around here somewhere? The must up-to-date info I ever found was on the subreddit called "rtlsdr."
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Jan 5, 2014 00:58
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revmoo posted:Is there an RTL-SDR thread around here somewhere? Any specific questions? I use mine on OSX with Gqrx and Cocoa1090 (for different purposes obviously).
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Jan 7, 2014 02:02
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Just looking for a place to throw random questions. I'm currently dealing with an issue with rtl_tcp where after a few minutes of running I start getting massive spikes all across the waterfall that goes completely away if I hit stop and then play again.
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Jan 7, 2014 22:21
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I'm so torn on whether I want to throw 40 bucks at a Baofeng, or at an SDR. Need a little maintenance toy once a year or so.
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Jan 7, 2014 23:00
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IJonny 290 posted:I'm so torn on whether I want to throw 40 bucks at a Baofeng, or at an SDR. Need a little maintenance toy once a year or so. My UV-5r gets more use than any HT I've ever had just because I don't have to worry about breaking it. The battery has a pretty low self-discharge so I leave it in the car a lot.
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Jan 7, 2014 23:08
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Jonny 290 posted:I'm so torn on whether I want to throw 40 bucks at a Baofeng, or at an SDR. Need a little maintenance toy once a year or so. Get a Baofeng. I use it far more than the SDR, and also those are getting cheap enough it's throwing-around money now (I think I paid half for the SDR what I paid for my UV-5R).
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Jan 7, 2014 23:19
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I've been wanting to try out some of the various digital voice modes, and DMR always has been one I wanted to try. Finally found a radio at a decent price, but the company is out until the end of the month. The price I was told when I emailed them was $180, which includes the programming cable. Looks to use a Kenwood connector for speaker mics, but doesn't say for sure. http://connectsystems.com/products/top/radios%20CS700.htm is the radio http://dmr-marc.net is one of the repeater groups out there using it. The only DMR radios I've seen for less than the 3-500 the big names want are on AliBaba, and the lowest was 230, without a US charger. We've used some CTI patch equipment at work and it's been going strong for more than the 10 years I've been there, hopefully these are up to that standard
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Jan 8, 2014 15:20
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