KC9YTJ on the air

I finally got around to buying a Kantronics TNC (KPC-3 Plus) so I could fiddle with FM packet, and was considering how to build a go-box with internal battery power for a spare FT-7900 that I’ve had sitting around (it used to be in the car before I replaced it with the TYT TH-9800) and the new TNC.

So looking around the web for some examples, I found this:  VHF/UHF Go-Box Complete

It’s a nice build, but it has features I don’t need, and lacks other features that I do need.  For instance, I don’t see the point of having the internal line-voltage power supply when you can feed the box from the PowerPoles.  NHA also doesn’t really explain how he gets the line voltage power into the dry box.  One assumes that if he’s added a connector for that on the outside of the box, the box is no longer waterproof (or he’s RTV’d the heck out of it).  Of course, with all the holes cut into the lid, even under the hinged cover, it isn’t really 100% waterproof anyway.  I’d just prefer not to violate the integrity of the box itself.

Since I can charge the batteries through the PowerPoles with my little float charger, or hook the whole thing up to a car battery, dedicated battery box, or external power supply ditto, I’m not going to bother with the line voltage supply.  That removes a couple of switches and makes room for a DB9 connector for the TNC, which will be inside the box with the radio.  Otherwise my build will look a lot like his.  I admit that I’m not sure why he used a TH-9800 for this, unless he’s planning to tote 6 and 10 meter antennae around with him.  My plan is to use a Slim Jim J-pole with the radio and TNC.  I’ve already been using that setup in the shack with the Slim Jim tacked up to the wall, so I know it works.

I’ll have more on that as the build progresses.  I’m still gathering parts at the moment 🙂

A few posts down, back in July, I opined on DMR being an evolutionary dead end, and gave a few reasons for that.

And for the last few days, DMR-MARC has been having major DNS issues.

Yet sandwiched in the middle of Facebook posts about the DMR-MARC problems, comes a ham talking about how superior DMR is to Yaesu Fusion.  Or, at least, going on about all the problems the new Yaesu Fusion lineup is being “plagued” with.

Here’s the trick.  Yaesu didn’t adopt DMR, probably for a reason.  They already have WIRES and WIRES-X for that, and outside of Japan, I don’t know that anyone has ever really adoped WIRES.

(Be aware that I don’t have any Fusion equipment and all I know about it is what I have heard.  So some of the below is speculation on my part.)

Comparing Fusion and DMR, despite the fact that I don’t own any Fusion equipment, seems like apples and oranges to me.  Fusion isn’t designed to do what DMR or WIRES or D-STAR do.  It does both analog and digital voice across the same repeater.  With WIRES-X, sure, you can probably do something similar to DMR.  I don’t hear people locally talking about WIRES-X, though — just Fusion.

I’m going to go out on a limb and state that any new lineup of hardware is going to have issues.  If you point to DMR and say, well, look how short a time DMR has been out there and it doesn’t have anywhere near the problems, I’ll respond that DMR has been around for a LONG time and got the bugs worked out of it by Motorola’s commercial customers.  Sure, Yaesu could have rebadged some of its Vertex commercial equipment and gone DMR. But they chose to innovate rather than pass along existing technology.

The current DMR-MARC outage makes me even more convinced that the dream of using DMR for emergency management is going to come crashing down once it strikes home that the Internet isn’t a reliable way to communicate in a crisis.  The actual net isn’t down — now.  But the DMR-MARC outage is suggestive of how a coordinated attack — or just plain “bad luck” — might take down the links between nodes and c-bridges in a real emergency.

Again, I’m not saying that this wouldn’t affect WIRES and WIRES-X networks, but Yaesu seems to have divined that it’s important to be able to bridge between analog and digital locally as well as through the Internet, and have designed their new repeaters and radios for that purpose.  While most of the DMR radios I’ve seen will do both analog and digital, I don’t think they’ll bridge analog and digital on the same repeater in the way that Fusion does.

Anyway, what do I know, I am only an egg.

So, way back at the Indy Hamfest, I bought a TYT TH-9800 from Steve Jones, W9SMJ, who happens to run State of the Art Communications up in the Russiaville area.  The TH-9800 is more or less a clone of the Yaesu FT-8900 FM quad bander (70CM/2M/6M/10M), but considerably cheaper — I got mine for $250.  Or maybe it was $225, I don’t recall for sure.  Anyway.

I installed it in the Escape vice the FT-7900 I had been using for awhile, and bought a diplexer to split the 2M/440 signal away from the 6M/10M signal.  I don’t really care about the 10M capability of the rig since I don’t think any of the 10M repeaters in Indiana are actually running, but we do have some 6M activity around here and I wanted the flexibility to go mobile with it.  The 6M signal is being piped to a Larsen NMO 150 (5/8 wave, 2 meter) antenna that is just short of a quarter wave on 6M.  I measured the SWR as less than 2, so I feel like it’s usable until I get around to buying a proper 6M mobile antenna.

The problem I had been having was diagnosed from signal reports as the usual Ford “disease” — ignition or fuel injector or SOMETHING noise into the radio on transmit — so I hadn’t actually been using it at all on 6 since the first couple of tries.  A few weeks ago I got around to adding a ground wire from the antenna mount to a sheet metal screw on the body, thinking that the problem was likely due to the mount (it’s a Diamond K400SNMO) being attached to the hatch and not the actual body of the car.  But I hadn’t had a chance to get a signal report yet.

As it happened, we were out last night when it was time for the 6 meter net, and I did a late check-in from the mobile just so the group knew I wasn’t dead or something, and apologized in case the signal was bad.  But I was told that I had a good clean signal!  So apparently, all it really took was getting a good ground from the mount to the body of the car, which was what I was hoping.  I really didn’t want to go through all the trouble I’ve heard it can be to chase down that kind of thing for a mobile.

So a bunch of guys at my lodge decided to up and get licensed.  And we hit critical mass for a club and went ahead and started one.  And since I’m the only Extra in the group, I ended up as the club call trustee.*  Got the club call just before the FCC went dark for 10 days, and put in for the vanity on 9/18, so it was processed today.  Yay!

We have bylaws and four members and more coming.  Now to build the station…and actually find a place in the lodge building to put it.  They’re making noise about a repeater.  And antennae.  And climbing on the roof for same.

I wish I were about 20 years younger 🙂

Anyway the Broad Ripple Lodge Amateur Radio Club – K9BRL will be on the air one of these days.  Maybe by Winter Field Day 🙂

 

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* This doesn’t necessarily follow, unless it does.

I’ve been a ham since April, 2013.  And in that entire time, the FCC web site has been in “transition”.  Actually it’s probably been “transitioning” longer than that.  So we’re looking at a minimum of nearly two and a half years, probably longer.

While I fully understand the magnitude of the task involved in bringing all the legacy systems together into a new unified website, what I don’t understand is why it took eight days of total downtime for all systems to be switched over to the new site.

At the very least, the FCC could have left the old site up but “frozen”, so you could at least look things up.

OK, so now they’re saying there’s a cabling issue…that is to say, cables weren’t run that they expected to have been run.  So ULS and some other things are still down and won’t come up till Thursday, 8AM at the earliest.

Your federal government at work!  The company I work for would be out of business if we had a 10-day outage. But the Feds aren’t constrained by the same urgencies that face the private sector.

There’s one born every minute.

Check out this web page, advertising what amounts to a Baofeng UV-5R with a few basic accessories (most of which I think come in the box, and if they don’t, they’re dirt cheap on eBay or even Amazon) for $320.

Dude, I have two of those.  I paid $45 for the first one, and $35 for the second one.  The only pieces I don’t have are the audio splitter and the remote PTT switch, and I could homebrew both of them in about an hour.

And I’ll bet nowhere in the ad copy is a suggestion that you need a license to use that radio on just about any service you can name.  Moreover, as far as unlicensed (or “licensed by rule”) services go, the radio is not certified or certifiable for FRS (even on low power, the radio puts out more than the maximum 1/2 watt, and it has a removable antenna) nor is it certified or certifiable for MURS use (while the radio can be set to low power (1W), it can be set to produce more than 2W on high power (4W)).  The only services that the UV-5R is actually certified for are part 90 commercial radio and part 97 amateur radio.  There is no part 95 certification for it at all, even though the prepper whackers keep saying differently (“Well, you know, in an emergency, the FCC isn’t going to be checking licenses or whether your radio is certified for that band”).

I mean, I have a GMRS license, but that still doesn’t qualify my UV-5R’s to be used for GMRS.

Obviously FCC rules don’t matter to people who don’t care, but it tickles me no end that this company probably does sell plenty of these 10x overpriced kits to unsuspecting buyers.

The more I fiddle with DMR, the more I think it’s an evolutionary dead end in Amateur Radio.

There is a lot of smoke and heat regarding systems like DMR, and D-Star, and even IRLP and EchoLink that allow amateurs to connect to far-off lands via repeaters that are linked via the Internet.  I’m not going to sit here and make the stupid argument that linked repeaters “aren’t radio” because of the TCP/IP link that does all the heavy lifting so you can talk to some other ham in South Waziristan via your local 70cm repeater.*

But I am concerned more and more about the ability to deliver on the DMR promise of local, regional, and worldwide communication across TDMA repeaters that have two time slots, or “channels”.  Even with the local, regional, and statewide talkgroups on TS2, and the others on TS1, there’s still going to be conflict when two locals are trying to have a QSO and someone on statewide or Midwest tries to have a different QSO.  (Yes, I understand that there are lockouts and timeouts that prevent you from stepping on the other guy.)  The only real answer I see to that is to have multiple repeaters in a given area and break up the talkgroups among them so that each time slot on each repeater has less of a load.  But that defeats the purpose, I think.  Another solution would be to split the bandwidth even further and go to four time slots of (effectively) 3.125MHz bandwidth each.  The question is whether or not you could reliably and intelligibly transmit digital audio in 3.125MHz.  (To clarify, DMR transmits TDMA 12.5MHz, but delivers the two time slots by interleaving the two signals to produce an “effective” 6.25MHz bandwidth per time slot.)  And another solution, I suppose, would be to introduce trunking…which I don’t think anyone really wants to do, because it is horrendously expensive.

And let’s face it.  If you really want to talk through the Internet with someone in South Waziristan, chances are it would be a lot simpler to fire up Skype.

The other concern that I have about DMR is the absolutely shitful programming software that is available for these really sophisticated radios.  I’m pretty certain that the software is shit because DMR started life as a commercial radio solution (MOTOTRBO) and, as someone who had to purchase a couple of Motorola handhelds for a building management association I once worked with, I found that such radios sold in a commercial venue are damned expensive.  On top of that, you don’t get programming software, because the vendor who sells them to you programs them for you.  At a cost.  And if you add channels, they reprogram them for you.  At a cost.  So even though the TRBO-type DMR radios have been around for some time, there’s been no particular reason for the manufacturers to come up with inexpensive, user-friendly programming software for them.  And why would they do that?  Buying a license for Motorola programming software appears to be a five-figure expense, from what I’ve seen on the ‘Net.

So Hytera/Tytera/TYT, who are the ones selling the comparatively-inexpensive DMR handhelds right now, but who also have a thriving commercial business where I imagine they also make big bucks selling programming software to vendors, have produced a piece of crap for end-user amateurs that requires a lot of work and sweat and blood to enter all the information you need just to program your shiny new MD-380 handheld.  Among the shortcomings of this piece of crap are 1) you can’t cut and paste from one codeplug to another, and 2) you can’t re-arrange things like group or contact lists easily (or at all, really).  In addition, the documentation sucks and the ancient MDI Windows interface is an embarrassment, and makes the thing really hard to use.  Why couldn’t they have used a tabbed window?

Someone needs to get one of these radios to RT Systems and beg them to build a programmer for them.

Another problem:  The fragmented nature of the DMR “network”.  In Indiana, we have two competing networks, Hoosier DMR and Crossroads DMR.  They don’t link and the operators apparently have no interest in making them link.  But that’s the usual problem you get in any arena when personalities get involved.  In the real world, if this were a commercial endeavor, there would be a national oversight body that would smooth over the personalities and make the system work.  But this is ham radio, so forget about anything like that.

Anyway, for me, the warm fuzzy glow of DMR has sort of worn off.  I’m seriously considering selling my MD-380 and buying a Yaesu FT-2DR.  At least I could get a decent programmer for it, and still use it in analog mode (and on 2M).

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* I’m only leaving out Yaesu because System Fusion, while it does support Internet linkage via the WIRES and WIRES2 interfaces, seems to be aimed more at the concept of letting folks with analog and digital radios interact on a more local basis.  So far I don’t see any real way to do that with DMR and D-Star.

This entire thread at eHam just has me thinking:

“You know hams…a bunch of bitchy little girls.”

(With apologies to Sam Axe.  And no apologies to anyone else in the thread.  Those guys are really something.)

I just don’t understand it.  The hams I’ve met and the hams I’ve talked to on the air are (mostly) the nicest people.  There is something about the Internet that just seems to drag all the bad apples in to cuss and fight and argue.  Now and then I get an interesting nugget from reading eHam, but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s worth wading through the load of crap to get to it.  I pretty much stopped reading the QRZ forums for the same reason a long time back, and now it seems like eHam is getting to be just like QRZ.

it occurs to me that I can’t understand why so many people use JT65 to make digital QSOs on 6 meters.  Wouldn’t JT9 be a better mode for that?  It’s a better mode for weak-signal contacts, and it doesn’t clutter up the band segment, either.

I sat there for hours on 6M the other day and saw lots of JT65 action, but never saw anyone spotted using JT9.

I have really arthritic hands.  So, last night, I was thinking, “Winding a toroid, how hard can it be?”

Turns out it can be very hard.  My hands still ache 🙂  Anyway, here is the one I wound.

Those familiar with the EARCHI End-Fed Matchbox may recognize this — because that’s what it’s for.  A 9:1 UNUN that goes in a little box with some hardware, and you attach about 35′ of #18 insulated wire and a counterpoise to get an “emergency” antenna that does 40-6 (with a tuner) and handles 100W.  I bought one of these assembled in 2013 as a “get on the air” antenna and it worked pretty well when I strung it as a vertical from a Jackite kite pole.  If I’d known then what I know now, I would also have added a counterpoise, but there was no ground terminal on the one I bought that would have made that obvious.  Apparently they changed the design after I bought mine, because now it does call for a separate counterpoise ground terminal.

I had idly considered buying another one for my shack-in-a-box, but EARCHI no longer sells the assembled antennas.  So I hammed up and bought the parts to make my own.  They are, absent arthritis, pretty doggone easy to build.