|
I had a killer awesome CB interaction once; took a 2 lane blacktop highway to santa fe and a blizzard hit. I was the first passenger car behind a semi leading all of us and he'd call out the big curves and such. Rare properly-used CB!
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2023 18:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 09:20 |
|
|
Thanks for the effort posts- I guess what I was looking for would be whatever device the local fire department would be using just in case there was an emergency. I am unsure of the legality of that, but in Nova Scotia our cell service has proven to be unreliable during hurricanes, with the one last year resulting in zero coverage for long periods of time.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2023 18:37
|
|
|
Professor Shark posted:Thanks for the effort posts- I guess what I was looking for would be whatever device the local fire department would be using just in case there was an emergency. I am unsure of the legality of that, but in Nova Scotia our cell service has proven to be unreliable during hurricanes, with the one last year resulting in zero coverage for long periods of time. If that's your goal, step 1 is asking the local fire department exactly that question. They probably are the local emergency management rally point, or will know where that is, and you'll be able to find out not only what types of radio services they might use that you can also use (which might be "none) but more importantly, which frequencies/channels they would monitor on those.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2023 18:48
|
|
|
Listening is free and open (unless its encrypted), talking to the FD on their radios is not legal unless somebody is literally dying right now in front of you. Which brings it back around to the ham disaster response angle - they're usually at least somewhat coordinated with emergency services, so they can filter through requests for help on the ham band and forward the important stuff to fire/EMS
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2023 19:18
|
|
|
My point in asking the fire department is that when I was an emergency management coordinator I had instituted a station for the local ARES/RACES people in the EOC, primarily to coordinate their volunteers on the street and to relay back information from shelters on check-ins, etc directly to the EOC but they also always had an extra radio on 146.520 and FRS channel 20 in case someone called.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2023 21:08
|
|
|
I know some local volunteers, I can ask them what they use I suppose. Is there such thing as a compact HAM radio for emergency purposes?
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2023 23:31
|
|
|
BAOFENG BF-F8HP (UV-5R 3rd Gen) 8-Watt Dual Band Two-Way Radio (136-174MHz VHF & 400-520MHz UHF) Includes Full Kit with Large Battery https://a.co/d/aX2uoqo
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2023 23:49
|
|
|
I've been thinking about getting into HF recently but discovered that as far as I can tell, none of my outlets have a ground wire connected, just hot and neutral. Maybe a stupid question, is there much of a risk of electrocuting myself or starting a fire if I connect a power supply and radio up to it? The circuit breaker is grounded and I'll have an electrician come take a look but was curious if I should put my plans on hold until I do that.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 23:54
|
|
|
do not plug in something that needs a ground to an outlet that does not provide a ground. call an electrician. if you rent, call your landlord.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2023 00:10
|
|
|
That's what I thought. Kind of weird it passed inspection without a mention in 2008 with all these 3 prong outlets that apparently have no ground. Would've thought that would be a red flag.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2023 00:20
|
|
|
Dineren posted:That's what I thought. Kind of weird it passed inspection without a mention in 2008 with all these 3 prong outlets that apparently have no ground. Would've thought that would be a red flag. Not sure what you mean by "passed inspection" but old building do not have to be brought up to modern code for any reason with only a very very few exceptions and almost all of them are for commercial. If it was code when it was built, or built before code, it is what it is. That being said, I don't see why you can't run a power supply on a 2 prong outlet to feed 12v to a radio. You're absolutely not going to "get electrocuted" unless you start licking partially inserted wall plugs. Will you have noise issues where you need to start grounding stuff in a different way? Maybe? Is there a ground in every box in your house/metal boxes that are grounded? Also maybe. I'm just not seeing a safety issue with modern 12v gear. Maybe.....MAYBE with some old boat anchor tube stuff if you're poking around in it/hot chassis issues (and that's not any less safe than when it was new because they only had 2 prong outlets then). But not with sold state gear or even anything hybrid (i.e. made 40-50 years ago).
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2023 00:26
|
|
|
it's the hot chassis thing. some power supplies make it uncomfortably easy to short things, too. don't play dumb "it's ok because ____" games when you're talking basic safety features like _ground pins_. if your plug has a ground pin, only plug it into things that are grounded. whether that's a self-grounding outlet or a proper electrical ground wire that goes to the breaker is up to the implementation. call an electrician if you aren't sure. importantly, if someone has to ask this question, they have no business making risk decisions in this area.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2023 00:30
|
|
|
Yeah our house passed an inspection in 08 with 3 prongs and cloth covered 2-wire to all the outlets. poo poo sucked. my ground pins would float right at 60v AC (because the outlet forms a capacitor between hot, neutral and ground, so it would end up being a 50/50 divider and keep the ground pins at 1/2 of the hot voltage). Virtually no ability to source/sink current though, nanoamps, just a phantom effect.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2023 01:04
|
|
|
Achmed Jones posted:it's the hot chassis thing. some power supplies make it uncomfortably easy to short things, too. don't play dumb "it's ok because ____" games when you're talking basic safety features like _ground pins_. I'm sorry, are you saying what I posted was wrong or somehow unsafe?
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2023 01:21
|
|
|
again: if one has to ask "is it a bad idea to ignore/disable/etc this safety feature," the answer is to not do that, and to call an electrician to have a self-grounding outlet or other ground system installed. if you, personally, somehow are taking this advice as a slight against your personal credentials, that's on you.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2023 01:26
|
|
|
and, again, modern linear power supplies can still have hot chassis (or otherwise easy-to-get-a-finger-in) issues.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2023 01:28
|
|
|
So yes, that is what you are saying. You either didn't understand the post or the content and were unable to tell me in what way it was wrong. Just putting forth a "just in case!" argument. If this is how you feel then no one should operate a radio because they just might accidentally lick high voltage DC on the back of it. If only there were some sort of licensing for this kind of thing that included safety that one had to pass before transmitting........
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2023 01:37
|
|
|
Licensing? Grover was a licensed electrical inspector at the end and he'd obviously say its alright! (It is alright, its just not up to modern safety standards. Just buy new commercial units and not garage sale jank that someone may have tinkered with internally and you won't have any issue)
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2023 02:03
|
|
|
it would probably be fine for most use cases. if one doesn't know, without asking the internet, if it will be fine, they do not have business making that assessment. this is because they will not know what actions, products, "deals," etc would suddenly make it not fine. i generally disagree that only garage sale jank has that problem. the problem certainly doesn't require mods (though they can of course make things worse) there is next to no reason not to just do the safe thing. anyway, i mentioned the ease with which you can short some modern linear supplies a couple times, if you wanna ignore that and say i didn't respond, not much i can do
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2023 03:01
|
|
|
I ground everything. ground coax before it enters house. ground all radios. edit: and remove animals from your devices.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2023 15:12
|
|
|
good news: SDRplay finally released the binaries for their new control program SDRconnect (which will supersede the old SDRuno) in august. i've been following the development since late last year, but i only just found out that they published binaries. the big new thing with this is networking support, so i was excited to try operating my ham radio receiver from a laptop over the wifi. works!  https://www.sdrplay.com/sdrconnect/
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2023 15:56
|
|
|
nice. I got a gen 1 sdrplay free from a friend and it is so much more capable than a rtl-sdr that its hard to even comprehend. way less susceptible to reflections and overload than the rtl-sdr. seems to be way more sensitive too. would not hesitate to get one of the newer models.
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2023 16:05
|
|
|
yummycheese posted:nice. I got a gen 1 sdrplay free from a friend and it is so much more capable than a rtl-sdr that its hard to even comprehend. i ordered rtl-sdr v4 and i hope it is an improvement over v3. but sdrplay is way better across the board, agree.
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2023 16:22
|
|
|
Big Mackson posted:i ordered rtl-sdr v4 me too but then i got it and put it on a shelf and didn't plug it in once i do, i suspect that getting it to work in a docker container is not gonna be trivial
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2023 17:25
|
|
|
Achmed Jones posted:me too but then i got it and put it on a shelf and didn't plug it in Why would it be any more difficult than any other device? Honestly, the rtl-sdr hardware is what I prefer because of the simplicity of getting it working on the host system in a way that I can taint a node and have something like op25 access the hardware. If you want to get super fancy, you can setup udev rules on the host system so that you don't even require privileged containers! Bottom line is, if you can get the hardware operating on the host system you can get it operable in a containerized slice of said system.
|
|
#
?
Oct 10, 2023 03:39
|
|
|
Does anyone have any opensource software they'd recommend to enable me to use my rig remotely over the network? It's an ft-991, so I'd want something that can just work with serial control and an audio interface. Basically I'd like to just plug an rpi or similar into it and be able to do voice from my laptop or something.
|
|
#
?
Oct 10, 2023 04:59
|
|
|
drunk mutt posted:Why would it be any more difficult than any other device? you probably want to read up a bit more on it. the answer is because it's not like any other device. i don't mean it's magic and special, just that: quote:The V4 requires the use of our RTL-SDR Blog drivers. Our RTL-SDR blog drivers are on GitHub. Please be sure to follow the installation instructions on the quickstart guide carefully as the V4 will not work with default Osmocom drivers. In most cases using our drivers simply means running our install-rtlsdr-blog.bat file, or replacing a dll file. (We are working to upstream the main changes to the Osmocom repo too). MacOS and Android users please note that we don't have a solution for you yet, but we are working on it
|
|
#
?
Oct 10, 2023 05:10
|
|
|
Achmed Jones posted:you probably want to read up a bit more on it. the answer is because it's not like any other device. i don't mean it's magic and special, just that: dang, all the poorly (minimum usable product) coded projects by various ham people to decode various things must be updated :/
|
|
#
?
Oct 11, 2023 14:08
|
|
|
I guess I'm missing something here, why does this matter inside of a container? This is crap that has to be done on the host system and once that's setup, provide access to those resources inside of the container. There are quick and easy ways of doing this that aren't very secure, but it'll work.
|
|
#
?
Oct 11, 2023 15:07
|
|
|
drunk mutt posted:I guess I'm missing something here, why does this matter inside of a container? This is crap that has to be done on the host system and once that's setup, provide access to those resources inside of the container. There are quick and easy ways of doing this that aren't very secure, but it'll work. most people running a fleet of containers for their silly personal projects aren't doing it on windows hosts. you can't run windows containers on linux hosts. someone has to create and share the container in the first place. the problem isn't with mounting a usb device in a container or dropping a binary inside a container, those are trivial. it's the whole "windows only" thing that's an issue, and that issue basically kills the containerization stuff before it gets off the ground once they figure out the driver situation on linux, assuming it's not something incredibly terrible and stupid, it'll probably make its way into various open source sdr applications (and associated containerizations of those applications) within a couple months
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2023 00:36
|
|
|
Achmed Jones posted:most people running a fleet of containers for their silly personal projects aren't doing it on windows hosts. you can't run windows containers on linux hosts. someone has to create and share the container in the first place. the problem isn't with mounting a usb device in a container or dropping a binary inside a container, those are trivial. it's the whole "windows only" thing that's an issue, and that issue basically kills the containerization stuff before it gets off the ground That makes sense, when I was reading through the github that I found on it it didn't seem like it was completely restricted to using the pre-built dll and that was just the artifact they offered up. Looked like with some work one could get it working within other build ecosystems. Don't doubt I am wrong there as I skimmed that repo.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2023 03:45
|
|
|
Helianthus Annuus posted:good news: SDRplay finally released the binaries for their new control program SDRconnect (which will supersede the old SDRuno) in august. For anyone else having trouble downloading it, the download buttons trigger a Wordpress plugin called "popup-maker" which uBlock's "AdGuard - Popup Overlays" list blocks so the popup that's supposed to have the actual button doesn't show. Either let it through your adblocker however you'd prefer or you can right click > inspect on the button and search for a div that matches the class name of the button, which contains an iframe you can load in another tab where the actual download link is.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2023 18:11
|
|
|
mind just posting the link?
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2023 19:17
|
|
|
drunk mutt posted:didn't seem like it was completely restricted to using the pre-built dll oh, good point. i haven't actually _tried_ just plugging it in to see what happens. i took down my sdr setup a couple months ago, and got a v4 for when i set it back up eventually. it could totally just work in some capacity or another with v3's drivers.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2023 19:20
|
|
|
Helianthus Annuus posted:good news: SDRplay finally released the binaries for their new control program SDRconnect (which will supersede the old SDRuno) in august. SDRConsole for Windows is still my favorite, but--especially on Linux--SDRConnect is pretty neat so far. Can't wait to see how it improves with further development.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2023 21:17
|
|
|
My dad has a little handheld scanner he uses for listening to trains. I don't really know what that actually means (workers on the passing train, communications to a main station, ?) but I get the feeling he just got his unit by just grabbing whatever he heard would do the job. He has no radio experience or anything. When he turns it on, it rapidly scans through a set range of frequencies until it finds something. I'd like to upgrade his experience but I'm not sure where amateur radio and train radio coincides. Does anyone have knowledge on this part of the hobby? Is train traffic generally encrypted or anything like that, and is there a common frequency range that would be particularly fruitful? I'm not necessarily fishing for product recommendations (though if you have any I'm all ears) but it'd be nice to gain more technical knowledge that may help him out. e: Possibly the same questions about airplanes, if anyone knows that as well. Thank you! BONESAWWWWWW fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Nov 6, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2023 22:25
|
|
|
Train and air traffic is generally unencrypted (as is ham stuff) for safety and reliability reasons. You can't have a plane crash or a derailment because somebody has the wrong crypto key loaded in their radio. Plus, it's not really a security threat. If your pops wants to listen in to some local ham traffic, you can look up the local repeaters on repeaterbook.com . Every scanner will cover the 144-148 and 440-450 MHz ham bands. Good way to see what's active in the area, and if he's interested in getting more into that. Airband frequencies in your area can be found at radioreference.com
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2023 23:29
|
|
|
BONESAWWWWWW posted:My dad has a little handheld scanner he uses for listening to trains. I don't really know what that actually means (workers on the passing train, communications to a main station, ?) but I get the feeling he just got his unit by just grabbing whatever he heard would do the job. He has no radio experience or anything. When he turns it on, it rapidly scans through a set range of frequencies until it finds something. I can help with airplanes at least (I'm an amateur radio operator and a private pilot). Aviation radio transmissions are un-encoded AM VHF radio signals. Almost any scanner or vhf amateur radio can receive these (please note that transmitting for non-aviation/emergency related purposes between 108Mhz and 137Mhz would be illegal). Between 108 and 118 Mhz is used for navigation (and would be extremely boring to listen to). You can find interesting aviation frequencies to listen to by putting your local airport into airnav.com or by finding your location on a FAA sectional chart and looking for nearby airports and boxes telling you approach control frequencies--skyvector.com is a good spot for that.
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2023 23:34
|
|
|
if your dad is at all computer-y, a usb sdr dongle would let him tune in train radio and all kinds of other stuff and they're ~$40 (or used to be? that could have changed) i've used mine to listen to near-ish train yards/traffic, air traffic control, etc.
|
|
#
?
Nov 7, 2023 04:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 09:20 |
|
|
One of my kids is really into trains and we go watch them regularly. We always monitor the radio traffic, which around here is between 160 and 161 MHz, so a 2m HT with dual receive works well. There’s usually a main frequency for the line, and then a separate frequency for nearby yard activity. I’ve seen lots of train enthusiasts with scanners, and it seems like scanning among all the relevant frequencies is a good approach. I’ve found that having a good, well positioned antenna makes the biggest difference in having a quality listening experience. (Obvious I know.) It might be worth seeing if you can get a better antenna for the scanner, or maybe a mag mount if he likes to hang out in the car. A 3’ antenna mounted to the top of a vehicle does a good job
|
|
#
?
Nov 7, 2023 06:31
|
|
