Greetings all,
As an update to my repeater project, I haven't done anything since my last post. I unexpectedly lost my job, and ened up having to go back to work for my previous employer. In the interrim, I picked up a couple clients of my own and between my regular job and my personal computer clients I've been quite busy. It's left little time to do much more than eat/sleep/work.
I ended up taking another very long driving trip last month from here to the Orlando Florida area and back. My son (the one I've mentioned in previous posts) needed to go pick up his daughter from his wife's parents there, and so we decided to make the trip non-stop other than for fuel and brief nature breaks. The goal was to leave after I got off work on a Thursday evening and be back in Iowa by Saturday afternoon. It would have worked, except my son wasn't able to sleep in the car. We made it to Orlando before sundown on Friday and were back into Georgia before midnight on the way back. We ended up having to pull over and sleep for a while, and we still made it back to Iowa on Saturday, but not until late. During the trip I had my APRS active so my wife could keep tabs on where I was. She worries about me, more than I worry about me. But I suppose rightly so since I have a heart condition. I may not be old, but I'm not as young as I used to be either. And so I still think I can do more than I really can. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, I managed to have a nice QSO on 2 meters while I was in Orlando. This time I don't remember the call sign of the gentleman I conversed with. I also received a couple QSL cards. One from N4SVC and one from KD4AMP. They were monitoring APRS.fi as we passed through northern Florida. Thanks to you gentlemen. It's nice to know someone keeps track of me!
If things ever slow down, I might be able to get back to projects.
Take care everyone.
73
Steve
KDØWSW
Saturday, January 3, 2015
Sunday, September 21, 2014
UHF to VHF Link system Part 1
As mentioned in my previous post, I'm planning on working on my repeater/link setup. I made it to the hardware/home improvement stores yesterday to pick up the rest of what I need for the caveties. Before I get started on all this, I'd like to see if I can coherently restate the goals of this project:
My apartment is not constructed in a way that I can reliably get a signal out in the directions I need/want them to go. The manamgement of the complex expressly forbids the use of external antennas in the apartment lease, and due to the contruction of the building, even getting a coax outside is next to impossible so a stealth antenna is also out of the question.
1. I would like to be able to use more than one of the local 2 meter repeaters. It would be nice if I could hit those in some of the surrounding counties as well.
2. In order to achive goal number 1, some sort of remotely controlled setup will be required. Some sort of a wireless link between my apartment and another more radio friendly structure. This link will have to handle an audio uplink/downlink with the VHF radio, and a method of changing channels as well as general system control.
3. Within my apartment, the control for this link must be portable and useable from any room.
These will be the base that I will work from. In furtherance of these goals, I have already purchased, bartered or built the following items:
(3) Motorola GM300 radios purchased from e-bay. 2 UHF, 1 VHF.
(1) Motorola R.I.C.K to be used as the repeater controller (bartered)
(4) Extra plugs for the rear of the Motorola radios (bartered)
(1) Motorola GM300 USB programming cable (built) used with Radio Doctor for Motorola Radius GM300 software. I'll try to provide a link later on.
(3) Mini-UHF male to BNC female to get the Motorola radio RF onto a more common connector (purchased from a local electronics supply store)
(2) BNC male to female T-connectors (purchased)
(2) BNC female bulkhead connectors (purchased)
(2) one gallon empty paint cans (purchased)
(1) 5/16 x 12 inch piece of brass tubing K&S brand (purchased from ACE hardware)
(2) 9/32 x 12 inch pieces of brass tubing K&S brand (purchased from ACE hardware)
(1) small tubing cutter (purchased)
(1) dummy load with rf voltage tap (built previously for a diagnostic project)
(1) inexpensive analog VOM (to be used to identify and set the correct notch for the caveties)
50 feet of RG58 coax (purchased for general project use)
(1) 20 foot by 1 inch wide tape measure (purchased for antenna building)
Miscellaneous lengths of PVC pipe for antenna building
Expected order of assembly for the project:
Build, calibrate, and test the notch caveties for blocking the UHF tansmit frequency on the receiver.
Clean, program, and test the Motorola tranceivers.
Examine the Motorola R.I.C.K., check the settings, and modify to use with the 3 radio configuration
Build (3) 1/2 wave dipole antennas. One for 2 meters, and two for 70 cm.
Convert a computer power supply to run the radios.
Wire up the radios and power supply.
Move everything to the remote location, assemble and test.
Timeline:
I'd like to have this done before the weather gets too cold to work outdoors. It's presently the 21st of September in Iowa, and normally this is still a warm time of year. But not so this year. At 10:30 AM, it's still less than 60 degrees outside. So I'm thinking this will need to be done before the end of October. That makes the timeline 6 weeks or less.
I'm really looking forward to doing this. I've wanted to do it for almost a year now. Why am I doing it this way as opposed to just buying something that would do all of this? For starters, I still have a limited budget. And some of the pieces I need to accomplish this are very expensive. I view this whole project as a great learning experience. Would I have had to build as opposed to buying the caveties? It's a toss up. For the two caveties I'm going to build, I've got about $30 invested. If I was going to build a full set of 6, that investement would go up to about $70. And you can buy some cheap Chinese made caveties tuned to your specific frequencies for less than $100. So in the long run, I'm not saving all that much by building my own. But the knowledge I gain by doing it myself is priceless. I've learned a lot just doing the research for this project.
For anyone that may read this in the future, as I perform each step, it will be documented with pictures and instructions.
73
Steve
KDØWSW
My apartment is not constructed in a way that I can reliably get a signal out in the directions I need/want them to go. The manamgement of the complex expressly forbids the use of external antennas in the apartment lease, and due to the contruction of the building, even getting a coax outside is next to impossible so a stealth antenna is also out of the question.
1. I would like to be able to use more than one of the local 2 meter repeaters. It would be nice if I could hit those in some of the surrounding counties as well.
2. In order to achive goal number 1, some sort of remotely controlled setup will be required. Some sort of a wireless link between my apartment and another more radio friendly structure. This link will have to handle an audio uplink/downlink with the VHF radio, and a method of changing channels as well as general system control.
3. Within my apartment, the control for this link must be portable and useable from any room.
These will be the base that I will work from. In furtherance of these goals, I have already purchased, bartered or built the following items:
(3) Motorola GM300 radios purchased from e-bay. 2 UHF, 1 VHF.
(1) Motorola R.I.C.K to be used as the repeater controller (bartered)
(4) Extra plugs for the rear of the Motorola radios (bartered)
(1) Motorola GM300 USB programming cable (built) used with Radio Doctor for Motorola Radius GM300 software. I'll try to provide a link later on.
(3) Mini-UHF male to BNC female to get the Motorola radio RF onto a more common connector (purchased from a local electronics supply store)
(2) BNC male to female T-connectors (purchased)
(2) BNC female bulkhead connectors (purchased)
(2) one gallon empty paint cans (purchased)
(1) 5/16 x 12 inch piece of brass tubing K&S brand (purchased from ACE hardware)
(2) 9/32 x 12 inch pieces of brass tubing K&S brand (purchased from ACE hardware)
(1) small tubing cutter (purchased)
(1) dummy load with rf voltage tap (built previously for a diagnostic project)
(1) inexpensive analog VOM (to be used to identify and set the correct notch for the caveties)
50 feet of RG58 coax (purchased for general project use)
(1) 20 foot by 1 inch wide tape measure (purchased for antenna building)
Miscellaneous lengths of PVC pipe for antenna building
Expected order of assembly for the project:
Build, calibrate, and test the notch caveties for blocking the UHF tansmit frequency on the receiver.
Clean, program, and test the Motorola tranceivers.
Examine the Motorola R.I.C.K., check the settings, and modify to use with the 3 radio configuration
Build (3) 1/2 wave dipole antennas. One for 2 meters, and two for 70 cm.
Convert a computer power supply to run the radios.
Wire up the radios and power supply.
Move everything to the remote location, assemble and test.
Timeline:
I'd like to have this done before the weather gets too cold to work outdoors. It's presently the 21st of September in Iowa, and normally this is still a warm time of year. But not so this year. At 10:30 AM, it's still less than 60 degrees outside. So I'm thinking this will need to be done before the end of October. That makes the timeline 6 weeks or less.
I'm really looking forward to doing this. I've wanted to do it for almost a year now. Why am I doing it this way as opposed to just buying something that would do all of this? For starters, I still have a limited budget. And some of the pieces I need to accomplish this are very expensive. I view this whole project as a great learning experience. Would I have had to build as opposed to buying the caveties? It's a toss up. For the two caveties I'm going to build, I've got about $30 invested. If I was going to build a full set of 6, that investement would go up to about $70. And you can buy some cheap Chinese made caveties tuned to your specific frequencies for less than $100. So in the long run, I'm not saving all that much by building my own. But the knowledge I gain by doing it myself is priceless. I've learned a lot just doing the research for this project.
For anyone that may read this in the future, as I perform each step, it will be documented with pictures and instructions.
73
Steve
KDØWSW
Friday, September 19, 2014
Summer's almost over
Greetings all,
Well, my son, the one I picked up from North Carolina in my last post, actually followed through on his desire to become a licensed ham operator. Took and passed his test the first part of August. Took his test on a Sunday, and his call sign was in the FCC database by Thursday morning. Very fast. His call sign is KEØBLE. He's been having fun since then.
I managed to do some bartering with a "local" business radio repair company and picked up a Motorola R.I.C.K. Supposedly it came out of a local fire truck that used it as a cross-band repeater. It's not exactly what I was looking for, but after having a long look at the manual, I think I can get it to do what I want. Which is to receive using one UHF radio and key the VHF radio. Then to receive from the VHF radio and transmit on a different frequency using a second UHF radio.
Originally I was going to go for a local repeater with a link to the VHF site. There was only a marginal reason to have a full repeater. The goal with this congolmeration is that I can still key the VHF radio if it's receiving. Why would I do that? Since it's primary use will be to link with a VHF repeater, there's a certain period of time after a transmission ends where the repeater's transmitter is active but there's no actual conversation taking place. It's permissible to key up and continue the conversation at that time. I'd like to be able to do that.
One of the things that concerns me with this setup is that I don't have any sort of duplexer assembly that one normally uses with a repeater. I never intended to have the radios share antennas. But the close proximity of the transmitter and receiver could still cause problems. I think I can get away with some sort of bandpass/bandreject filtering on the receiver. To that end, I found a set of instructions for making a diy UHF duplexer out of 3 LB coffee cans. After doing a lot of research on the internet, I'm going to try using gallon paint cans instead. I picked up the connectors I'm going to need at the local electronics parts store. I'll pick up the empty paint cans and the other pieces and parts I'm going to need at either a local home improvement store or a local hardware store. Then I'll try my hand at building some notch filters.
I'm going to document this entire build process with pictures, so hopefully I'll have something to post soon.
Until then ...
73
Steve
KDØWSW
Well, my son, the one I picked up from North Carolina in my last post, actually followed through on his desire to become a licensed ham operator. Took and passed his test the first part of August. Took his test on a Sunday, and his call sign was in the FCC database by Thursday morning. Very fast. His call sign is KEØBLE. He's been having fun since then.
I managed to do some bartering with a "local" business radio repair company and picked up a Motorola R.I.C.K. Supposedly it came out of a local fire truck that used it as a cross-band repeater. It's not exactly what I was looking for, but after having a long look at the manual, I think I can get it to do what I want. Which is to receive using one UHF radio and key the VHF radio. Then to receive from the VHF radio and transmit on a different frequency using a second UHF radio.
Originally I was going to go for a local repeater with a link to the VHF site. There was only a marginal reason to have a full repeater. The goal with this congolmeration is that I can still key the VHF radio if it's receiving. Why would I do that? Since it's primary use will be to link with a VHF repeater, there's a certain period of time after a transmission ends where the repeater's transmitter is active but there's no actual conversation taking place. It's permissible to key up and continue the conversation at that time. I'd like to be able to do that.
One of the things that concerns me with this setup is that I don't have any sort of duplexer assembly that one normally uses with a repeater. I never intended to have the radios share antennas. But the close proximity of the transmitter and receiver could still cause problems. I think I can get away with some sort of bandpass/bandreject filtering on the receiver. To that end, I found a set of instructions for making a diy UHF duplexer out of 3 LB coffee cans. After doing a lot of research on the internet, I'm going to try using gallon paint cans instead. I picked up the connectors I'm going to need at the local electronics parts store. I'll pick up the empty paint cans and the other pieces and parts I'm going to need at either a local home improvement store or a local hardware store. Then I'll try my hand at building some notch filters.
I'm going to document this entire build process with pictures, so hopefully I'll have something to post soon.
Until then ...
73
Steve
KDØWSW
Monday, June 2, 2014
Long Time No Talk (No pun intended)
Hello.
Still working on my local repeater project. I manged to pick up the last radio I was going to need for it, so I'm pretty well set. There was one minor setback. The local club I belong to (CVARC) published a repeater usage guideline. One of the items in there specifically says no cross-band repeating. Which is of course exactly what I'm planning on doing. So I took some time at the last club meeting to talk to the repeater trustee, explain my situation, and ask for a variance. He was quite understanding and after going over what I had in mind he gave it his blessing. So the project is still on but again holding for more parts. The deep-cycle battery and a repeater controller. I either have to buy or build one of those. I certainly have enough "stuff" to be able to build a very robust controller. I'd like to be able to combine my repeater controller with my radios in such a way that I can do channel direction. The radios have pins on the back that allow me to apply a simple binary code to switch to any of the 16 channels programmed into the radio. This would allow me to use more than one repeater. It would also allow me to put in an out-of-band control system to turn things on and off, make setting changes, and of course change channels. I can do it, but time is an issue. So I may end up buying first and building later.
On an unrelated note, I took a 2500 mile round trip to North Carolina and back this past week. I went out to pick up my son and his family and bring them back to Iowa to live. I put my CB (yes I still have one) and my Alinco DR-635T together in a stack and took them on the trip. I also used APRS to allow my family to track my progress both ways and to look for other hams in the area to talk to. Early Thursday moring, I supposedly drove within 6km of someone else on 520 somewhere on the east side of Knoxville, but they didn't respond to my call. I managed to have one nice QSO early Saturday morning as I was going around the South end of Cincinnati. Talked simplex on 146.520 to a great operator. I was so fried at the time from lack of sleep that I can't accurately remember his call sign. I think it was KD8ECG. Just looked him up on QRZ, and that's correct. After listening to the CB off and on during the trip, my passengers found the ham QSO quite refreshing. Clear, clean, and no bad language. That impressed them the most. My son is now asking about becoming a ham. Told him I'd help. We'll see.
Enough for today.
73
Steve
KDØWSW
Still working on my local repeater project. I manged to pick up the last radio I was going to need for it, so I'm pretty well set. There was one minor setback. The local club I belong to (CVARC) published a repeater usage guideline. One of the items in there specifically says no cross-band repeating. Which is of course exactly what I'm planning on doing. So I took some time at the last club meeting to talk to the repeater trustee, explain my situation, and ask for a variance. He was quite understanding and after going over what I had in mind he gave it his blessing. So the project is still on but again holding for more parts. The deep-cycle battery and a repeater controller. I either have to buy or build one of those. I certainly have enough "stuff" to be able to build a very robust controller. I'd like to be able to combine my repeater controller with my radios in such a way that I can do channel direction. The radios have pins on the back that allow me to apply a simple binary code to switch to any of the 16 channels programmed into the radio. This would allow me to use more than one repeater. It would also allow me to put in an out-of-band control system to turn things on and off, make setting changes, and of course change channels. I can do it, but time is an issue. So I may end up buying first and building later.
On an unrelated note, I took a 2500 mile round trip to North Carolina and back this past week. I went out to pick up my son and his family and bring them back to Iowa to live. I put my CB (yes I still have one) and my Alinco DR-635T together in a stack and took them on the trip. I also used APRS to allow my family to track my progress both ways and to look for other hams in the area to talk to. Early Thursday moring, I supposedly drove within 6km of someone else on 520 somewhere on the east side of Knoxville, but they didn't respond to my call. I managed to have one nice QSO early Saturday morning as I was going around the South end of Cincinnati. Talked simplex on 146.520 to a great operator. I was so fried at the time from lack of sleep that I can't accurately remember his call sign. I think it was KD8ECG. Just looked him up on QRZ, and that's correct. After listening to the CB off and on during the trip, my passengers found the ham QSO quite refreshing. Clear, clean, and no bad language. That impressed them the most. My son is now asking about becoming a ham. Told him I'd help. We'll see.
Enough for today.
73
Steve
KDØWSW
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Crazy drivers and creaping crud
Hello all,
This is most decidedly not going to be a radio related post. If you came for that, you can skip this one altogether. The purpose of the post is simply to let you know I'm still alive out here.
As mentioned, I attended the Ham Broadband seminar the first of February. It was informative, and I'm looking forward to getting invovled in it. When I left there, I stopped at the local Wal Mart to pick up a prescription, and on the way out of the parking lot got backed into. The person doing the backing tried to make it into my fault, and if I hadn't been distracted by some other crazy person trying to back into me just prior to the accident, I might have seen him moving and been able jam on the brakes and avoid being hit by him. It's a month later now, the $1900 in damage to my car has been repaired (you wouldn't have thought the damage was that much to look at it), and all's right with the world.
Had a nasty case of the creaping crud beginning the following week, bad enough to keep me away from work for a day. And that's bad because my employer doesn't give sick days.
From a radio perspective, I'm still in a holding pattern. The local apartment complex finally got the electricity turned on in my garage, so that part is taken care of. What I need now is a big deep cycle battery. Something that I can use to run my inverter and the radios. The inverter is for the garage door. And with the deductible for the insurace on the accident, that kind of killed my available funds for a while. I still have big plans for this whole repeater/link, and looking forward to getting it online. Until then, will still be going things the old way.
73
Steve
KDØWSW
This is most decidedly not going to be a radio related post. If you came for that, you can skip this one altogether. The purpose of the post is simply to let you know I'm still alive out here.
As mentioned, I attended the Ham Broadband seminar the first of February. It was informative, and I'm looking forward to getting invovled in it. When I left there, I stopped at the local Wal Mart to pick up a prescription, and on the way out of the parking lot got backed into. The person doing the backing tried to make it into my fault, and if I hadn't been distracted by some other crazy person trying to back into me just prior to the accident, I might have seen him moving and been able jam on the brakes and avoid being hit by him. It's a month later now, the $1900 in damage to my car has been repaired (you wouldn't have thought the damage was that much to look at it), and all's right with the world.
Had a nasty case of the creaping crud beginning the following week, bad enough to keep me away from work for a day. And that's bad because my employer doesn't give sick days.
From a radio perspective, I'm still in a holding pattern. The local apartment complex finally got the electricity turned on in my garage, so that part is taken care of. What I need now is a big deep cycle battery. Something that I can use to run my inverter and the radios. The inverter is for the garage door. And with the deductible for the insurace on the accident, that kind of killed my available funds for a while. I still have big plans for this whole repeater/link, and looking forward to getting it online. Until then, will still be going things the old way.
73
Steve
KDØWSW
Friday, January 31, 2014
Sidetracked
Good day all. I've been away from the keyboard and radios in general in the recent past. I guess the best term to use would be "Sidetracked". The weather here has been horrendously cold, and so I had to take the head for my radio out of the car to prevent damage to the display. I did get on the air last weekend long enough to be net control for the weekly new ham net and to participate in the ARES net that follows the first one.
I'm still patiently working on my local repeater/link system. My most recent efforts have been to included a control link using FRS radios (Which I have many of). I'd like to keep all control off the primary channels. I'd also like to have some sort of combination DTMF control with Voice response system using text to speech synthesis. So my efforts since my last post have been along the lines of how to add those elements to this project. I've been doing copious amounts of research on text to speech trying to find something that sounds pretty natural without breaking the bank. There are lots of very robotic sounding text to speech applications, some of which would run quite handily on a Raspberry Pi. But I'm aiming for something that is completely understandable without having to do much fiddling with getting the sound I want from the voice.
The beginning of the solution that I've come up with is to use one of my old Android phones (I have two) with a great sounding text to speech dataset already loaded on it, and the write a simple text to speech app that I can connect to via bluetooth and send commands to produce speech from the phone.
The other side of the busy coin is that work has been an absolute zoo for the last couple weeks. By trade I'm a computer desktop support person. And we've had some real head scratchers come through the office in the last couple week. Most recently an HP laptop which needed a hard drive replaced. The factory restore disks turned out to have a bad driver on them which prevented certain things from taking place on the laptop. Installs and updates most notably. After beating my head against this for several days, I found an obscure reference to updating this particular driver along with links to it. Turned out to be an HP update for the driver in question. Installed the driver, and boom, things started working. Prior to that I had tried reinstalling the image 3 times, an in place upgrade once, and full on plain vanilla install once. The vanilla install actually worked, but the license key on the bottom of the laptop was unreadable, and the one I recovered from the semi-working image wasn't accepted by Microsoft as being valid.
Monday, I spent a morning in a snow drift on a county road just north of the Fayette/Buchannan County line. Had to wait for the county maintainer to show up with his plow and pull me out. Then I got stuck again while I was turning around. That was just plain embarrassing. I live in Iowa, so snow is inevitable. I'm not complaining about that at all. If I didn't want to be here, I'd move to a warmer climate. Although I think this year that might have to be South America since Florida and Texas are experiencing hard freezes and ice/snow storms.
Enough rambling. Hope you've had a fun filled couple weeks. When I get the chance to get back to it, I'll post updates on the repeater. It won't be this weekend though. Going to be doing a ham broadband seminar at the public library so that will keep me busy.
73
Steve
KDØWSW
I'm still patiently working on my local repeater/link system. My most recent efforts have been to included a control link using FRS radios (Which I have many of). I'd like to keep all control off the primary channels. I'd also like to have some sort of combination DTMF control with Voice response system using text to speech synthesis. So my efforts since my last post have been along the lines of how to add those elements to this project. I've been doing copious amounts of research on text to speech trying to find something that sounds pretty natural without breaking the bank. There are lots of very robotic sounding text to speech applications, some of which would run quite handily on a Raspberry Pi. But I'm aiming for something that is completely understandable without having to do much fiddling with getting the sound I want from the voice.
The beginning of the solution that I've come up with is to use one of my old Android phones (I have two) with a great sounding text to speech dataset already loaded on it, and the write a simple text to speech app that I can connect to via bluetooth and send commands to produce speech from the phone.
The other side of the busy coin is that work has been an absolute zoo for the last couple weeks. By trade I'm a computer desktop support person. And we've had some real head scratchers come through the office in the last couple week. Most recently an HP laptop which needed a hard drive replaced. The factory restore disks turned out to have a bad driver on them which prevented certain things from taking place on the laptop. Installs and updates most notably. After beating my head against this for several days, I found an obscure reference to updating this particular driver along with links to it. Turned out to be an HP update for the driver in question. Installed the driver, and boom, things started working. Prior to that I had tried reinstalling the image 3 times, an in place upgrade once, and full on plain vanilla install once. The vanilla install actually worked, but the license key on the bottom of the laptop was unreadable, and the one I recovered from the semi-working image wasn't accepted by Microsoft as being valid.
Monday, I spent a morning in a snow drift on a county road just north of the Fayette/Buchannan County line. Had to wait for the county maintainer to show up with his plow and pull me out. Then I got stuck again while I was turning around. That was just plain embarrassing. I live in Iowa, so snow is inevitable. I'm not complaining about that at all. If I didn't want to be here, I'd move to a warmer climate. Although I think this year that might have to be South America since Florida and Texas are experiencing hard freezes and ice/snow storms.
Enough rambling. Hope you've had a fun filled couple weeks. When I get the chance to get back to it, I'll post updates on the repeater. It won't be this weekend though. Going to be doing a ham broadband seminar at the public library so that will keep me busy.
73
Steve
KDØWSW
Monday, January 20, 2014
It works . . . I think
After programming the Motorola GM300 VHF radio yesterday, I built a simple interface cable to be able to connect up a non-Motorola microphone and a PTT button. For that, I used a headset I had lying around and a big button designed to be used on a commercial video game. I also took the time to add a Dean's power connector to the pigtail I was using for the radio so I could connect it up to the power supply the right way. For the antenna, I picked up a mini-uhf to so-239 adapter at Radio-Shack and hooked up my usual 3 element yagi.
I was able to key the repeater, but the operator I talked with said my audio was low. And that's entirely possible. Motorola uses a pre-amplified microphone, so there may not have been enough output from the setup I was using.
So I'd say that this purchase was a qualified success. Qualified in that there will need to be more testing done to see if the radio is able to actually perform the functions I have in mind for it. Function one is as a digital coms radio. Both APRS and digital packet. APRS will require that I get a TNC, but general packet I can do with a simple homebrew interface and a computer. My junkbox has expanded enough that I should be able to bolt together the interface, and I have a spare quad core AMD computer around that I can use as the host system. Function 2 would be an Echolink radio. Again, I need the interface and computer. But I think I can use the same interface and computer for general digital and Echolink. The last function would be as a repeater system when combined with another radio. This fits in with my original overall project for this year.
Having worked with Motorola radios for years in law enforcement, I've come to view them as sturdy and well built. Pretty much able to take any punishment dished out to them. After some continued research on the net, I find that this isn't the case for the GM300. It's very much a consumer level device, meaning it's the standard 5-5-90 duty cycle. I'm hoping that by adding a temerature controlled fan or fans on the heatsink for the PA deck, that I can "adjust" the duty cycle into something a little more useable.
Time for work. Have a wonderful day!
73
Steve
KDØWSW
I was able to key the repeater, but the operator I talked with said my audio was low. And that's entirely possible. Motorola uses a pre-amplified microphone, so there may not have been enough output from the setup I was using.
So I'd say that this purchase was a qualified success. Qualified in that there will need to be more testing done to see if the radio is able to actually perform the functions I have in mind for it. Function one is as a digital coms radio. Both APRS and digital packet. APRS will require that I get a TNC, but general packet I can do with a simple homebrew interface and a computer. My junkbox has expanded enough that I should be able to bolt together the interface, and I have a spare quad core AMD computer around that I can use as the host system. Function 2 would be an Echolink radio. Again, I need the interface and computer. But I think I can use the same interface and computer for general digital and Echolink. The last function would be as a repeater system when combined with another radio. This fits in with my original overall project for this year.
Having worked with Motorola radios for years in law enforcement, I've come to view them as sturdy and well built. Pretty much able to take any punishment dished out to them. After some continued research on the net, I find that this isn't the case for the GM300. It's very much a consumer level device, meaning it's the standard 5-5-90 duty cycle. I'm hoping that by adding a temerature controlled fan or fans on the heatsink for the PA deck, that I can "adjust" the duty cycle into something a little more useable.
Time for work. Have a wonderful day!
73
Steve
KDØWSW
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