AmateurRadio.com

I was at a church meeting the other night and I happened to have my HT clipped to my belt, although it was somewhat hidden under my shirt. The bottom of it was showing when I sat down on the couch and a friend of mine asked me, “dude, is that a pager??” A pager. Right. I unclipped the Baofeng UV82-1 and showed it to him, and he asked if it was a ham radio, to which I said yes. Then he proceeds to ask the standard questions (he knew I was into ham radio because of my Facebook posts, so he didn’t guess this on his own)

That small conversation got me to thinking about the fact that most people have heard of ham radio, but they know little more than just the term. The main question I am asked when someone sees my HT is “hey, can that thing talk around the world?” Most people don’t understand the difference between HF/VHF/UHF or at least they aren’t aware that ham operators can use the higher frequencies.

Ham radio isn’t one of those hobbies that is chosen by people who wake up one Saturday morning and say,” hey, I think I want a radio license.” Most people are introduced to it by another ham operator. My exposure came from an older gentleman who has now gone Silent Key, whom I actually met over the CB Radio. (Yes, I worked CB when I was in high school and college) Had I known what ham radio was back then, I would have definitely studied for my license earlier than I did, but as it is now I got my first license at the age of 20.

So this older gentleman, whose name was Nelson, brought up the topic of Ham Radio one day, so I asked him what that was. After he explained it, we decided to study together and take our tests. I got my callsign of KC5HWB in July of 1994, and he got his just a couple of weeks later of KC5JMY. Back then the Denton Club was very active, which I believe it still is, and we worked those machines up in Denton and Lewisville areas. The main repeater I was on during that time was the N5GEJ repeater at the Texas Instruments plant in Lewisville on 145.170MHz.

So how did you hear about Ham Radio? Who do you have to thank for finding this cool hobby for you?

Back in the day, we Hams used to get blamed for everything!

Now, it’s come full circle and all these new fangled electronic devices seem to be polluting our bands with all kinds of RF noise.

It used to be that we had to prove that we weren’t the “interferers”, and now we have to prove that they are! Who would have thought that one day, the tables would be turned?

I remember when I lived in East Brunswick, I lived a couple of houses away from the only guy in New Jersey that didn’t have cable TV. He used to gnaw on my ear all the time that I was interfering with his TV. I even had him over to the shack to show him that my station wasn’t interfering with a small portable TV that I had set up there. That the TV picture didn’t so much as flicker when I transmitted didn’t convince him in the least.

But the funniest time (and you really just had to shake your head and laugh) was once when he confronted me as I pulled into my driveway. He was standing at the fence and was literally yelling at me how he couldn’t even use his TV the past couple of days because I was “screwing it up so bad”.

“Really, Bob?” I asked, “The past few days have been really bad?”

“You’re darn (he didn’t use “darn”, but this is a family friendly blog) right. I haven’t been able to watch TV the past four nights because of you and that Ham Radio of yours”.

I smiled (which made him angrier, but I couldn’t help myself) and answered, “Then that’s a pretty good trick, Bob, because I’ve been out of the country for the past two weeks. I just got back from the airport.” I had been in Switzerland on a training session for my old job.

Of course, the facts made no difference. I was still to blame as far as he was concerned. I can chuckle about it now, but back then it was annoying and upsetting to always be harped on for something that wasn’t my fault. It got to be that I hated walking out my own back door, dreading the next needless confrontation. I think that experience is one of the factors that drove me to go QRP full time, as I never want to go through that again.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

I like to play with new radios and own a small collection of Wouxun and Baofeng models. After my recent issues with my Wouxun HTs, I’ve been looking at trying the new AnyTone AT-3318. Has anyone here had a chance to use one?  If you get a chance to use one, come back and leave a comment to share your thoughts about it.

The specs look promising and the price is competitive ($99.00).

• 5 Watts VHF
• 4 Watts UHF
• RX & TX 136-174 MHz & 420-520 MHz
• RX FM Broadcast 79-108 MHz
• Wide Band & Narrow Band
• 2.5 kHz tuning step for splinter frequencies
• 5/Tone encode and decode
• 199 Channels with Alpha Tags
• Squelch level adjustable for each channel
• Squelch tail elimination
• CTCSS that really works – when scanning channels, radio will stop ONLY when CTCSS tone is present
• VFO Scanning – frequency limits can be set for both VHF & UHF
• Channel Scanning – scanned channels can be ADDED or REMOVED via the keypad
• Frequency Reverse button – exchanges TX & RX frequencies
• Talk Around button – sets TX frequency to repeater’s output frequency
• Programmable by computer
• EASY to manually program
• Keypad totally lockable to meet FCC Part 90 requirements

I received a note from Thomas Andersen, OZ1AA, sharing some information about his around-the-world bike trek:

This is the story of an adventure across countries, continents and cultures, enriched by the spirit of Amateur Radio.

Apart from ham radio I have been interested in cycling since I was a kid. I also love to travel so it was somewhat natural for me to combine my passions in life into a perfect match. I first did some shorter bike trips in Europe including a three week ride through the Balkans in 2007. A year later in the middle of the financial crisis, the startup company I was working for suddenly went bankrupt. I wasn’t slow to hit the internet and look for a cheap flight ticket to a warm place. I spent the next 2 months cycling from South India to Delhi and had an amazing time. After the trip I decided to plan for “The Big Ride”, but first I needed to earn more money.

When I came home from India a got a job on Faroe Islands. Apart from the fact that the beer up there is incredible expensive, I figured it would be a good place to save up some cash as there wouldn’t be a lot of other things to spend money on. During a long and dark winter I managed to make 28000 QSOs as OY3AA and save up the money I needed. In the beginning of October 2010 I came back to Denmark and one week later I was saying goodbye to friends and family on the central square in Copenhagen.

After more than 20,000 km and three years on the road, I learned that there is always a radio amateur around, ready to give a helping hand. I have now reached South America and started cycling north from Ushuaia. The goal is to reach Canada within a year.

I think it would have been possible to do what I am doing without being a radio amateur, but there is no doubt in my mind that it would be a much more boring trip. I can’t honestly think of any other hobby where you can show up in any town in any part of the world and be welcomed like I have been. I have realized this is unique because my non-radio friends simply can’t understand how I can know so many people. They think I am the world’s best networker, but all I can tell them is: Become a Ham and you will have 1 million friends around the world as well.

A sincere thank you to all hams who helped making this possible. Amateur radio spirit is alive!

Follow his ride via cyclingtheglobe.com or via Twitter. Also, if you’re on his route (the North American portion is mostly Eastern U.S./Canada), consider showing him some local ham hospitality! 🙂

In a surprise announcement tonight, Ed Griffin of Import Communications (Wouxun.us) has abruptly ended sales and support of the popular Wouxun radios.

As one of the largest Wouxun distributors, Import Communications was selling as many as 500 radios per month, according to the company.

In an email to customers, Griffin indicated that he had been having difficulty dealing with the manufacturer in China. He also claimed that all Wouxun radios contain an “internal defect” which the factory is unwilling to address.

Griffin’s description of the lost memory problem / reverting to speaking Chinese matches my experience with two of my Wouxun radios.

Griffin wrote that he would continue to sell Wouxun accessories and is in the process of importing a new dual-band HT manufactured by Anytone.

Every Saturday morning from 9am until around noon, the Hurst Amateur Radio Club meets for tech-talk and all-around live ragchew at the Hurst EOC, which is located at Hurst Fire Station#2 in Hurst, Texas.  This is a fun time to get together and talk shop on anything related to Amateur Radio. Usually there isn’t a scheduled format, we’ll just pick a topic at random and share ideas, information, and answers to questions.

Today’s topic was the Broadband Hamnet. I posted about this topic the other day for the first time. I also purchased a Linksys WRT54GS router on eBay this week, which arrived in the mail yesterday, so I was able to bring it with me to flash the firmware and get it ready for the Broadband Hamnet.

In short, this is a wireless network that is separate from the standard Wi-Fi network used by the public.  With certain routers you can change frequencies that the router uses, which fall inline with ham-usable frequencies, and setup a sub-network to communicate only with other hams.  From what I understand there is an entire network already covering Dallas-Fort Worth, with nodes setup on towers and buildings that any Wi-Fi  router, after modification, can connect to, and allow the operator to use this network for communications with other hams. They have a great “getting started” page here.

I’m now officially online at my QTH in Grapevine, but I wasn’t able to find any other nodes in my area. Of course I only have the stock antennas on the back of the router, inside my home. So its time to find some external antennas and a setup the router outside.

This, of course,  poses some challenges since these routers aren’t really made to be weatherproof.  The coax line between the router and the antenna can’t be more than a few inches (there is probably a formula, but I don’t know what it is).  So you basically have to mount the router right next to the antenna.  There are enclosures that will house the router and a power source, and are weather-proof, and mountable onto a mast or tower.  Listed below are some links I have found for doing all of this.  I’ll probably change or update this list before the project comes to fruition, but for now, here is the build-list I am planning:

• A WRT54GS router.  There is the version with the most memory, according to this hardware list.
• An Enclosure.  I found a Multilink RNI-3620 Outdoor Residential Enclosure (Cable Box) on eBay.  Under $24 with free shipping, and it comes with mounting hardware.
• A couple of Antennas.  The WRT54 routers have dual antennas on the back, which are movable, and connect via a plug called RP-TNC.  Finding the correct connector shouldn’t be too much of  problem, but pay attention to this.  The cool thing about having dual antennas is that I can connect both a directional yagi or dish type antenna and point directly to another node, and also an omni-directional antenna which should listen and talk to anything within a certain distance.  Titan Wireless is a good place to find 2.4GHz antennas for base mounting.
• A power source.  You can use PoE or you can run an outdoor, weatherproof extension cord up to the router and connect the power directly.  This will depend on where I decide to mount the enclosure.  At this point in time I am thinking about mounting it to the top of my chimney on my 2-story house.  This will be about 30 feet in the air. I could run an extension cord from the chimney, down the side of the house, and into the garage.

I own a Wouxun KG-UV2D from Import Communications and a KG-UV3D from HRO. They are both great radios and I honestly can’t complain too much about their small annoyances. They are extremely affordable and have proved durable and reliable. They represent a great value and I continue to recommend them.

About a year ago, however, my KG-UV2D developed an annoying habit. Out of the blue, it would lose all of its programming and revert to some kind of factory default. The condition is easy to detect as it starts talking Mandarin on power up. Really handy if you’re in the middle of something important.

At first I attributed the problem to the fact that the radio may have been dropped one too many times, and maybe I’d bent the battery contacts causing the radio to somehow reset itself. I bent the contacts out a little and things seemed to be OK for awhile. After it started happening again, I invested in a second Wouxun, the KG-UV3D, and relegated the KG-UV2D to backup status. It still worked fine, but it I had become concerned about its reliability.

Fast forward a year…. Now my KG-UV3D is exhibiting the same annoying problem. Is it due to user error? Abuse and neglect? Maybe, to some degree. But I find it strange that the same problem has now occured in both radios.

There is very little information online about this problem, but there has been some discussion about it occurring. Some people report that it happens when you let the battery run dead. Others report that it can occur when swapping batteries. Neither of these scenarios describe my situation. My radios were fully charged and I only use the batteries supplied with each radio.

One common factor between both radios is that I use the excellent KC8UNJ KG-UV Commander programming software. I have had great luck with this and recommend it for its ease of use and intuitive memory channel management. Could there be something about the software, how I’m using it (number of memories or settings), or how it programs the radios that is causing the radio not to retain programming in some cases? This really doesn’t make sense as I know MANY people who have used this software without any problem.

Have you experienced similar problems with your Wouxun HT or heard of it happening? If so, have you had any luck tracking down the issue?

Thanks in advance!