Wow, time flies! I missed my chance to post some updates, so I wanted to go over what I’ve been able to do in my free time.
Allstar
So this one has been a bugger, what I’ve found is the allstar image is garbage, barely works if it works at all. Several people have advised I go try hamvoip.com to make my allstar node. So that’s on my list for HOPEFULLY this week, but work has been keeping me pretty busy, and my birthday, vacation, and 4th of July are all coming up very very fast.
Winlink
I was driving home a couple weeks ago and heard the comms on our local repeater of the guys trying to prep for the Winlink exercise and it spiked my interest. Not that I would probably use the winlink service very much, it seemed like a very easy thing I could contribute some tower space to. The catch? I wanted to do it as cheaply as possible but easily. So far I have spent approximately 300$ purchasing the parts, the last thing remaining is a Signalink USB sound card. Trying to get one on Ebay, but man people are crazy right now with pricing! If I get it at my budget, we’re talking a 400$ rig for winlink, if I have to buy at full price, we’re talking 450$ for a rig. But I hope to be able to do a tutorial of that when it’s all said and done, since I couldn’t seem to find many tutorials on WHAT kind of radio to buy to make it easy! 😛 Which seems to be a common thread. I ended up purchasing a Yaesu FT1500m for the Winlink, and plan on using Vara FM with a Signalink USB, but we’ll see how those plans meet engagement!
Field Day
So that was actually quite a lot of fun, I missed the first half, but got to the club around 9pm yesterday, and around 1030/11, while working 20m I made contact with a BC Canada Station on QRP! 13 Watts! That was kinda cool, but definitely lots of issues with propagation, I went home around 1230, but when I got back the rest of the club let me know there was plenty of atmospheric interference, so that sucked! Looking forward to the next event, and I am definitely interested in the Radio we used for QRP, Makes me want to go after my next license class so I can use it in the field!
Truck Radio
Picked up a Yaesu FT400 for the truck, and wired it in. For about a week, I was complaining about how low the volume on the speaker was, turns out, adjusting the volume knob helps a lot! Got APRS working on it too! So excited for that, and very happy to have a radio in my daily driver.
Anyways there’s just a quick update for what’s been going on on this side of the world!