Seeing some news trickle in on the proposed geo sat which may cover parts of North America. AMSAT-DL is now calling it "futureGEO."

For me, this is probably the most exciting thing happening in ham radio. I'm ready to make space contacts.

I found a #hamradio community on Matrix. Joined one of their channels and was almost immediately asked to leave since I am not a licensed operator. Talk about gatekeeping.

What do you call a ham radio operator in the middle of the dessert with no A/C in their car?

Baked ham.

—

Why did the Op-Amp cross the road?

Because he kept receiving negative feedback.

—

Two windmills stood on a hill with a radio.

One turned to his friend and asked, “What’s your favourite music?”

The other windmill said, “I’m a big metal fan.”

—

What's the difference between the Congress and my 60 year old ham radio?

My radio still has a working speaker.

I had to reset my mastodon.radio password, so while I was there, I created a pointless "app." Now, my posts sent from this laptop will show up as sent from "TM-V71A" to anyone who views them from mastodon.radio.
Why?
Why not?

@ai6yr @HopelessDemigod @tsherrygeo Install a CW beacon on your bike instead, where the speed of the code is determined by the speed of the bike.

@HopelessDemigod Same. Back when conspiracy theories were mostly just harmless entertainmet and not government policy.

Just "unsubscribed" from qslworld.com

Not that I ever asked them to use an "ai" to confirm contacts I had 4 years ago and blend in new data (I've moved since then!) Which makes the entire thing invalid.

Sorry to anyone who likes using it but sending me QSL confirmations I've never asked for by email via a service I've never interacted with that has incorrect data harvested without my permission (I assume they scrape qrz.com for email addresses) and then asking me to "unsubscribe" :alex_angry:

For a while now, I have wanted to ghet into #meshtastic. I still haven't done it.

I want to put up a node as high as I can, probably on my 33 foot telescopic antenna mast outside. More antenna gain is good.
As this would be unattended once set up, since it won't be easy to access, I want enough battery power to run for a few days without a charge, and a solar panel to top up the battery.
I want another node inside to relay that one... or maybe it's the other way around.

So, spend my money. What am I buying?

As an amateur radio operator, I could transmit at higher power with more gain, but this also means no encryption.

Talking to my parents about when we went sailing around the South Pacific in the 80's and how you kept in touch pre-Internet. They had a ham radio, they did a check-in with a friend once a week.

But then there was Pacific Net. This was one guy, a hobbyist with a big antenna somewhere in Hawaii. He did a broad cast daily at a set time. Gave weather updates and did check-ins. You'd ask to be added to his check-in list. He would ask for your check-in and you would give your location and your heading. Tell about weather conditions and any other news you had. He would give you information about your location he'd gathered from everyone else he talked with. Like "this is what to expect at the port you are headed for" etc.

If you heard someone on the check-in that you wanted to talk to, you'd ask them to switch to another channel for a private chat.

Absolute early Internet vibes.

#sailing #HamRadio #PreInternet

Listening further, I think this is actually a Yaesu repeater, which has a built-in pointless delay anyway, which is somehow linked through RF to something else that is adding it's own substantial delay. Then, the audio you hear back from the repeater is coming from that remote source instead of the repeater itself. Anyway, it's obnoxiously long.

I've just found a repeater in Islip, NY, powered by, I think, HamVoIP, with the longest delay I've ever heard on any repeater. It's easily two full seconds of buffer when you let go of the PTT.

444.750 Plus, PL 110.9. Sounds like the emphasis curve on that repeater isn't optimal, either.

There is a guy on one of the local repeaters here, who's call is KE2DYL.
My original call was KE4DYI.

It took just over 31 years between when KE4DYI and KE2DYI/KE2DYL were assigned sequencially. 2 is that far behind 4. In the United States, calls are issued in sequence, skipping any that have already been assigned due to vanity.

So, anyway, I've not heard KE2DYI on the air, and probably won't, but I did contact KE2DYL just for my own internal gratification, because almost, but not quite.

No crossband between 1.25m and anything else, though, so I guess, if I get this radio, I'll probably keep my Alinco DR235T around for 220, as I can use it in combination with my existing TM-V71A and an Allstar node to crossband between either 2m or 70cm and 1.25m. Believe it or not, this is something I do occasionally.

It has been confirmed by this video from Don Arnold that the up-coming Kenwood TM-D750 will, in fact, feature a traditional 6-pin DIN data port. I wasn't sure about that, and didn't want to even consider the radio unless it had one.

It's a good chunk of change to drop on a VHF/UHF triband mobile (dualband outside of IARU2), but there won't be anything more accessible in this class for those with visual impairments thanks to it's built-in speech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a5WMQ5B1D8

I just checked into a net on a linked system using probably the least close hop to me, just because I usually can't hear that repeater. For my efforts, net control got my call sign wrong, then immediately got it wrong again after it was corrected. Whatevs. If India sounds like Echo, I guess there's not much I can do.

There are currently 9,885 of 40153 total Allstarlink nodes online.
As of this post, that's 3,674 more online nodes than Echolink has. Don't know how many Echolink node numbers there are, but I know it's over 100,000.
Given it is much, much easier to run multiple Allstarlink nodes from the same public IP address than is the case with Echolink, this doesn't translate to that many unique users, as many have multiple nodes.
Not sure why I'm posting this other than Echolink fatigue.

@ground024 That's just the lack of proper de-emphasis. I just kinda quickly threw an EQ curve together.

@ground024 And here's a test recorded from the 9600 output of my TM-V71 and de-emphasized. It's limited a bit on the high end against some other radios, but not in a bad way.

@ground024 Here's a really short clip recorded from my MD-UV380, received by a modern SHARI running a firmware that doesn't break the high pass filter.

@ground024 Yep. I've got two classic MD-380's. Looks just like the MD-UV380, but TX audio is better on both analog and digital on the UV. My two MD-380's are almost unusable because of the scratchy pots.