AmateurRadio.com

Fred and Yimin of Youkits

When I attended Maplecon I recorded at conversation I had with Yimin and Fred, VE3FAL, of Youkits.  I have turned that recording into the first VA3STL podcast.  I am making it only available here for the time being.  If I make any more audio podcasts I will think about putting them on iTunes. Please click on the link that follows.

VA3STL Podcast#1 Conversation with Youkits

As the podcast is something new to me and an experiment, I would appreciate any feedback via a comment, or direct e-mail.

Youkits TJ6A transceiver

By the time August comes along, the Es openings on the VHF bands are generally dying down a bit. Certainly, I’ve been checking 50MHz less frequently from the car and I’ve even been thinking about what band I’m going to use the IC706/mobile for over the winter (more on that soon!).

However, chatting to Ken, G3LVP this morning about 70MHz, he told me that yesterday there had been an opening to Portugal on 70MHz. Ken had worked CT1FJC from the Algarve.

So, keep checking those bands!

Paul, VP9KF (W4/G4BKI) has posted on his blog that the ‘DX Code of Conduct’ initiative appears to have drifted away from the originators of the concept, FOC

Either way, the DX Code of Conduct website which Paul is a little disparaging about DOES take the DX Code of Conduct to a new level and invites amateurs to sign up to it. If you sign up to it, your callsign is displayed as a mark of your commitment to reducing the level of poor behaviour on the DX bands.

Paul’s right – there are a few technical issues with the site – which I am sure can be resolved really quickly, but the intent and concept is great. It’s good to see the idea being developed and moved forward.

You can sign up and demonstrate your commitment here

This score looks familiar, but the distribution by band is different.  Need more practice!

NCCC Sprint Ladder - Aug 27

 Call: K8GU
 Operator(s): K8GU
 Station: K8GU

 Class: Single Op LP
 QTH: MD
 Operating Time (hrs): 0.5
 Radios: SO2R

 Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
 -------------------
 160:
 80:  10     10
 40:   9      7
 20:  10      6
 15:
 10:
 -------------------
 Total:  29     23  Total Score = 667

 Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club

As regular readers will know, I’ve been playing about with APRS quite a lot in recent weeks and I’m starting to get the urge to build something APRS related. I’m planning to order one of the inexpensive FoxTrak kits, which lets you use a standard VHF FM radio to transmit position reports. To do that you also need a serial GPS and on searching eBay I became aware that serial GPSes seem to be rather more expensive than USB or even Bluetooth devices. This led me to wonder whether it would be possible to hack a USB GPS to use with a tracker like the FoxTrak. My investigations led me to this article by Primiano Tucci on GPS Hacking.

This post is basically an un-loseable bookmark to myself, since it will probably be a few weeks before I get around to working on this and by then I’ll have lost the article and never be able to find it again. But it might be of interest to someone else or provoke some interesting comments.

Although I’ll probably build the the FoxTrak as-is and test it with one of my 2m rigs I’m really interested in trying HF APRS on the move without having to buy an expensive TNC or lug a laptop around me so I can use AGWPE to generate the 300baud audio. So I’d also be interested to know whether anyone has modified the FoxTrak (or the TinyTrak which I believe is very similar) for the 300baud tones? I know the OpenTracker+ from Argent Data does 300baud “out of the box” but it’s quite a bit more expensive, enough more expensive to attract the punitive import fees that will almost double the price.