Amateur (Ham) Radio BS and Callsign Thread!

Well. Just worked Tokyo from NH.

 

In case anyone is looking for antenna mounts I've got a pair of NMO-converted CBI ditch light brackets for sale.

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/colorado-trading-post.148930/page-1422#post-23151416

 

If this thing where the government is handing out money I gave them for working 40+ hours a week since I was a teeny-bopper actually exists, and I get some of it, I think I need an HF rig. Or I could pay off some debt. Or I could get an HF rig.

Anyone operate the Yaesu FT-857D? I'd like a base station in a box so I can take it portable.

edit:
Or it might make more sense to set up a 2m/70cm base station and have an FT-891 in a box. More radio, same price. There are some decent 50W dual band radios available under $400 I would imagine. I only need one frequency up at a time so no need for another TM-V71A.

 

I have an FT-857 if you want to spin dials.

Realize that Yaesu discontinued it, though, so if you're looking for something new it'll have to be the FT-991 if you want 2/70 as well.

Just my $0.02 but unless you're in a situation where you need to really save space, such as a mobile installation, the only benefit to the FT-857 is VHF/UHF SSB. Otherwise an FT-891 and a dual band mobile is more flexible. The FT-857 for all it's usefulness isn't a lot of fun to operate being so small.

If it was me I'd go FT-891 and TM-V71. That's roughly the same money as an FT-991. In that case you'd lose 2/70 SSB but also Fusion. So the FTM-300 or FTM-7250 get the digital mode, although still no SSB.

Also relatively speaking the 857 is a dead-end platform since Collins no longer makes filters and thus Inrad doesn't offer them any more. So unless the radio you're looking at used has filters you want (like a 300 Hz for CW perhaps) you're going to have to start watching eBay.

 

Thanks, @DaveInDenver . I realize it is discontinued but I also know manufacturers discontinue products when other, sometimes better products come out and that doesn't make the discontinued product any less useful. Of course is the 857 is clumsy, I will take your word on it.

I'm not interested in proprietary digital modes like fusion. I was thinking CW and SSB on 2m and 70cm might be fun but on second thought, I don't think it would be that lively or useful. How many people operate outside of FM on 2m and 70cm anyway?

The Yaesu FTM-7250DR is only $210. That would work for me, I would leave it at home full time. Then an FT-891 for portable.

You guys running tuners on a portable setup?

 

@joshuajayg, don't misunderstand, I'm not selling my FT-857 any time soon, if ever! It's a handy radio for a lot of things.

I have sometimes run 2m SSB for simplex DX. Like activating summits. There's also SSB VHF and UHF on VO-52, AO-7 or FO-29, some of the amateur satellites. The FT-847 or TS-2000 are the radios best suited for that but you can use the FT-857 with some effort I suppose. Haven't ever tried personally, though. But generally speaking, yeah, FM and now digital is 99.8% of what most people use on 2m and 70cm.

It was discontinued I think mainly because it's been around a long time now and eventually technology improves (such as DSP in the FT-891 and FT-991 is much superior) or because the components become hard to source (like the FT-817 was replaced with the FT-818 I think for this reason). I only warn about a FT-857/897 because it's not possible to find new filters is all. A good radio will always be a good radio even though it's been surpassed in the market.

I have an ATAS-120 screwdriver for it (I once had it mounted mobile) as well as a LDG Z-11ProII tuner for wire antennas, which is my primary tuner for it.

 

@joshuajayg

The ft-891 is a good rig. The RX on it is solid.

Here's a contact I made with Japan. You can get a rough idea what in working with. That was notched, squeezed, contoured + at the 1400 area, and the rf gain brought to the edge.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/xKoTHbtSPr7iXUUt7

 

Not sure how long this radio has been around, the concept seems neat. It's a head-less VHF/UHF 50W radio that uses a smartphone app to control it. Having a radio face running besides a phone or tablet for APRSdroid does seem redundant when you think about it.

Gigaparts is selling it for $160. I'd like to see some technical numbers, I would not be surprised to hear the quality and performance are not good. Some of my Google poking around indicates it not only lacks any type approvals (like Part 90) but it lacks FCC Part 15 testing even, which isn't confidence inspiring.

The Vero VR-N7500



https://www.verotelecom.com/VERO-VR...obile-Radio-With-APP-Programming-p541441.html

https://www.gigaparts.com/vero-vr-n7500-50w-dual-band-mobile-radio.html

https://m6ceb.com/reviews/vero-vr-n7500-dual-band-fm-app-controlled-radio-review/

 

Quite interesting...if it has an Android app, then I can mount it and just use the convenience of the truck's head unit to do the display.

 

Fucked, but cool. (Pun can be implied)

 

The app sounds like a recipe for disaster with that thing. They should have made a head for the radio with the option of using the app only.

 

I was thinking a virtual FTM-400 app would be neat.

 

I'd pass on just a tablet or phone interface.

I can grab a knob while driving without looking and spin in to find a repeater. Not as easy to do with a touch screen. Would be an interesting extra option.

 

My thoughts also. Also what about when they decide to not support the app anymore and it disappears from the app stores? Then you have a brick that can’t even be sold unless you sell the phone with it. Idk, seems like a nice option but not a primary means of controlling the radio. Look at how many 20+ year old rigs are out there still being used.

 

Man, hams can be such curmudgeons resisting to change. This coming from a 50 year old who insists on vinyl records and tube amps for music even. ;-)

Your point can be argued for a lot of things technological, sometimes they are dead ends but doesn't mean the idea isn't without merit. Without a smart phone a Mobilinkd TNC isn't very useful but they are popular.

I have no interest in this particular radio since even $160 is too much to throw away for something that as you say will lack any serious support. More importantly it is likely a horrible RF noise source so trying to hack it is pointless. But the idea not only would solve space issues looks to me like the next step being essentially a mobile VHF/UHF FlexRadio SDR. You can get a Flex that's a black box that runs a virtual interface on a PC or one with a physical controls, the firmware is upgradeable for new features. They offer an API so anyone has the hooks to write their own interfaces and do new modes.

We hams and two-way in general is stuck in the past. We have this idea of what a radio looks like, display, knobs, buttons and when it doesn't then it's not a radio.

Icom already have their IC-9700, which is a VHF/UHF SDR in a big bench-top sized box with familiar knobs and screens. When they introduce a mobile version that looks similar to Chinese things or maybe like a IC-7100 it'll be the next big thing.

But Icom's remote software RS-BA1 is terrible. So maybe more like that Avatar SDR a few years ago. Don't know that it went anywhere commercially, though. It was open source radio with actual TX power based on GNU Radio, a little like HackRF is I suppose. Those can only achieve about 15 dBm, about 30 mW, of TX power, though. So need an amp.

A FlexRadio VHF/UHF mobile would be really cool I think. Don't need the same software filters and spectrum display they build for HF but how about being able to implement whatever digital mode you want and writing an interface that combines phone and packet in one app?

 

I see this from a bit of a different angle.

One of the attractions to amateur radio is the ability to reach outside of a disaster area after an event, such as a major hurricane. During such times, the cellular network will be spotty and overloaded at best. Would this interface using a cell phone still work?

 

As far as I can tell it's wouldn't need cell service or WiFi to work. All it's doing is virtualizing the face functions of the radio in an app and uses Bluetooth to communicate to the radio.

I think I'd miss a volume and squelch knob but otherwise would be handy. I might go a different way, have a dedicated radio "device" that's essentially a custom 7" tablet with a couple of knobs and a row of button you can assign to functions. It would network to various radio decks, multiple ones even. You build the app to do whatever you want, mix and match functions. It would look a lot like the face of an FTM-400 except the screen would look like a phone home screen instead.

Heck, you could build a DIN-sized device with a small screen or two and the buttons and knobs if you didn't want a big tablet and only wanted it to do two-way operations. The screen would show contextually what you needed. All these radios are already full of microprocessors so iterating the firmware to be more of a generalized OS and SDR is the way it's going anyway.

 

For a few years during the BP oil spill I was out of town a lot, so I converted my HF contest station to be operated remotely. Had a TenTec Omni VII, Alpha 87A, and stacked yagis. That was back before the remote station boom, so I had to figure it all out on my own. I used Lantronix ethernet com port adapters for the rotors winkeyer and linear.

I started doing more multi ops when I quit traveling as much. My ops hated the Omni VII receiver so I sold it. Leaving everything hooked up in the summer was also dangerous. Lightning repair trips (plural) for the 87a were $1500 minimum.

I use Kenwood 570s now. It's got a pretty good remote interface (I don't use it often), but it doesnt do IP audio like the TenTec. The TenTec also had a remote knob, but it was just a pain. The mouse/keyboard was easier.

 

I’m not against change at all. But I’m aware of how apps seem to want to crash with either updates to the app or OS updates. If you need the radio to work then an app crashing and making the radio unusable isn’t a good thing. A display that could connect to use the phones WiFi would be another option as to addition features. Perhaps to add DMR to the radio. All I’m saying is for the radio to continue to work in the future then it would reply on app support. OS’s change constantly and cause problems. Ham’s are know for having backups to their backups. Also kinda disturbing seeing in the article that android has more features of the radio than the IOS version. So for IOS users they would be crippled on features from the get go. Would you want a radio that you can’t access all the features of?

I’m just saying you are at the mercy of a app developer for this support. Most radios if an issue happens there are quite a few options for repair instead of one.

Plus I’m quite fond of buttons.

 

This is already true of APRS clients since iOS only has one (aprs.fi) that can communicate serial Bluetooth to a Mobilinkd TNC3. If you have an Android then there's APRSdroid and what else? This is my point, though, having an open source or at least API would I think make a black box radio like this a paradigm shift because you aren't completely beholden to one company or developer to get the features you want.

There's decades worth of radios out there for you then! I'd really dig a 2m/70cm mobile-sized FlexRadio with an AMBE vocoder to tinker with, though.