Very High Frequency
In the last month, I’ve helped stand up 2 new digipeaters. One at the top of
Columbia Heights in Longview and (soon to be) on Rainier hill across the river.
Both of these machines have good elevation and line of sight, so in a default
digipeater configuration of ^WIDE[12]-[12]$, they end up bringing in a fair
bit of “out of area” traffic to the local RF channel that can clog up the
works.
Unlike summer 2020, I found significantly less time for radio projects this year. Between mentoring a team of interns at my day job and twice as many weddings as usual, I rarely had time for more than Monday net control and occasional check ins.
It’s been a busy, busy last two weeks working on the
dzcb 0.3.x sprint
[changelog], and there
are a lot of new, exciting features that should serve the amateur DMR
community:
Your account at Repeaterbook.com has been temporarily suspended due to unusual export activity. We are seeing multiple CSV exports occurring from multiple IP addresses less than a second apart. This could only be accomplished by some sort of bot. This puts a substantial strain on the server resources.
Since releasing dzcb last week, I’ve added Anytone support,
published a demo video,
and updated the walkthrough
on how to generate your own customized codeplug in the cloud with Github Actions.
After 3 months of sporadic development, I’m pleased to announce the public release of my DMR codeplug generator, dzcb.
Last Saturday, I participated in a simplex testing exercise in Kalama, WA to determine communication capability in the absence of grid comms. The activity was sponsored by W7MSH - Mercury Mount St. Helens.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with the SDR scanner and ham2mon-gui interface for playing back the recorded calls. However, in the last week, there have problems keeping the calls flowing, causing the interface to be hours or days behind.
Tonight Sam and I checked into the CARA Net (Audio) while we were out driving around. Meanwhile, back at the home QTH, the SDR scanner was recording the net…
tl;dr New Logs are Here
The day of talking to the same people on many different modes!
Today we took a hike on Mirror Lake Trail, near Mt. Hood, Government Camp. [APRS Track].
Today I experimented with DMR on my new TYT MD-UV380 dual band HT.
Friday, October 9, we took a hike on S. Coldwater Trail, near Mt. St. Helens’ Johnston Ridge Observatory [APRS Track].
Saturday Oct 3 - 4, we took a backpacking trip to Snowgrass Flats in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and I took the opportunity to test out APRS coverage in the area and chased a SOTA activator!
Comments make an otherwise static site interactive and engaging for readers, but for jekyll/github pages sites, there aren’t a lot of options for enabling comments. Disqus and Facebook comments are free, but include invasive tracking that slows the site down and forced sign up which increases friction and reduces contribution.
In this post, I share my 2m/70cm frequency and repeater list which I’m constantly revising and editing. I program these frequencies into my various radios to achieve somewhat consistent results regardless of which unit I’m operating.
Today the family took a trip up to Mt. Rainier National Park [APRS Track].
You can run Kenwood’s windows-only memory control software on macOS (<10.15) or linux using Wine.
After deploying ham2mon with ham2mon-gui on my Mac Book Pro, I was interested to see how the software would perform on dedicated, but more limited hardware: the Pine64 Rock64 single board computer.
This setup allows for the automatic simultaneous capture of multiple narrowband FM signals. The ham2mon-gui enables easy archiving and playback of captured files. Primarily I’m using it to listen to every 2 meter repeater within hearing distance to my home QTH of Longview, WA.
Preregister for the GNU Radio Conference 2020 to learn about exciting developments in the software defined radio space.