Jack Roland KEØVH@q.com - CBRE, CBNT, and AMD KLove /Air 1 Denver Engineering
HAPPY NEW YEAR from the Roland Family!
Lots of stuff to post here as the new year begins! The first item is the restoration of an RCA Master series radio. This one is my wifes favorite and my good friend, WB7AHO, Greg is an expert in restoring life to these old beauties! I have replaced tubes and Greg graciously was nice enough to help me find another problem. We had a great time on New Years day playing with radios and having ham fun!
Greg’s workbench
Testing the circuit
Part of Greg’s stock of replacement tubes
As reported last month, EMF assistant engineer Patrick, is now KDØTRZ and is operating mobile and handheld here in Colorado. Congratulations to Patrick and it is now easy to communicate even if we are both of different sides of the state. Patrick has a Wouxun Handheld and a Yaesu mobile that he operating.
KDØTRZ operating mobile in Denver
APRS is the “Automatic Packet Reporting System that ham radio operators use to send and receive messages, and transmit location beacons. I have my system running in the EMF truck and it sends beacons out to various APRS I-gates and digipeaters around the state letting my wife and others see where I am on the internet. Many details on APRS available doing a search on Google. You can see where my beacon is at map.findu.com/ke0vh-2. With this site you have to hit “refresh” to get updates, but a site that live tracks the beacon is at APRS.fi.
The APRS.fi site following my beacon
The APRS “GO” kit on the seat of the truck
APRS “GO” kit opened up
The Icom 706MK2G and Streetpilot III GPS on the dash of “Truckzilla”
My APRS system consists of an Opentracker + interface, a Streetpilot 3 GPS, and an Icom VHF rig set to 144.39, the national APRS frequency. Any GPS capable of outputting the NMEA 0183 format to a “TNC” device will work. The Opentracker (http://www.argentdata.com/products/otplus.html) acts as a “TNC” for taking the GPS data and converting it to the information transmitted over the radio to a APRS digipeater or Igate to show up on APRS maps. There is a lot of information on this on the net as I stated earlier so I wont go into all of that here, but if you have any questions shoot me an email at ke0vh@q.com.
Another site for an APRS tracker is http://www.byonics.com/. The TinyTracker is available in many forms including a self contained tracker.
And finally, one of my favorite QSL’s received from a contact this past summer:
And as always don’t forget the SBE IRLP (and Echolink) Hamnet, the first Saturday of the month. Details on how to join are at http://www.qsl.net/ke0vh/sbehamnet. I hope you will be able to join us and share your engineering and ham exploits!
73’, God be with you, & see you next time! KEØVH