Icom IC-F3GS

I picked up an Icom IC-F3GS VHF handheld transceiver at the NARC tabletop sale on Wednesday – a lovely little radio but it did make me think ‘why do I need another handie’?

Well I suppose it’s as much for the challenge of ‘taking control’ of the thing – I’ve had a great bit of fun researching programming software and cables, and I’ve just managed to reprogram it away from Norfolk / Suffolk ambulance channels onto Amateur 2m frequencies.

And it was a bargain, and it’s a nice radio, and you can never have too many handies?

If push comes to shove I’ll just punt it on to someone else at the next sale, having had my fun.

IOTA 2011

Last year was my first attempt at the Islands On The Air contest. Operating as 2E0HPJ I decided to give it a good crack in the 12hr section – especially once it had been decided that the Bittern group weren’t going to be running a club station.

I had great fun, learned a huge amount, and I’m delighted to have found out today that I came 27th in the 12hr SSB low power single operator unsassisted category.

I’m now looking forward to this year’s competition, and seeing if I can better that.

GB5SLB

Great fun at Sheringham Lifeboat Station with the Bittern DX Group at the weekend, operating for the RNLI SOS Radio Week. – we even got featured in the EDP

More photos

Same again next weekend.

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Amateur Radio Android Apps

I’ve been playing with an Android tablet at work for R&D purposes – I’m not enough of a gadget head to part with my own money for one – and naturally the first thing I started to search for was what apps there are to support the Amateur Radio fraternity.

They seemed a bit fragmented, and few obvious lists of what was available, so I thought I’d make one

I’ll update it as I discover more.

Playing with old technology

My current project is seeing if I can get an AllStar station set up.

I’ve got an old laptop running the ACID CentOS distribution – all going swimmingly apart from the fact that I’ve not been able to find a USB Soundcard fob yet that will play nicely with app_rpt – I can’t get any audio out. All the documentation I’ve found relates to older models – the ones I’ve been able to get on eBay seem to be newer. Ho-hum.

Talking of eBay, I bought a PMR Products K4 Repeater as taken out of an ambulance – not necessarily for the repeater controller, but because it contains a Kenwook TK-752 VHF tranceiver and two TK-852 UHF tranceivers, and also a Procomm DPF70/6 UHF duplexer and assorted useful bits of mounting hardware.

The radios I believe have been modified to be ‘controlled’ by the K4, and have audio and control signals coming out of the back to a 9pin D – but that could be just what I need.

Digging in to how to program these things I come across problems of modern technology not necessarily playing well with ‘old skool’ – first I have a good old trip down memory lane wiring up serial leads and converters, now it transpires that I need to resurrect an old PC running no later that Win98 with a floppy dirve to run the programming software. Lucky that I (hardly ever) throw anything away and I would hope to have all the necessaries in a junk box somewhere.

Well that will be ‘fun’, but I hope I will be able to reverse engineer what’s going on with the data transfer so at least I can run it off modern hardware in the future.

Not much progress other than boxes with lids off and cables strewn everywhere, and Jim has a big grin on his face!

Adventures in Amateur Radio

So I know that most blogs start like this … “I intend to document the process of …” etc., but my 2012 New Year’s resolution is to actually do it.

I’ve had a blast over the last 14 months getting my Full UK Amateur Radio licence, now to do something with it!