Ramblings of yet another nerd…
As I said, there’s going to be more to come on this. Shortly after publishing my last entry on this overall topic, I realized that this was something I wanted to discuss at some length. On previous installs, I was a FIRM believer in soldering ALL of my connections. I had the belief that the …
Read More Mobile Install 3.0… physical attachment of wires to things
Let me start by stating one thing. I am NOT in the same ballpark as a professional 2-way installer. Those guys do hundreds of installs a year, and have methods and reasons for doing what they do. What it takes me an hour to do, they can do something functionally equivalent in 5 minutes. My …
Read More Mobile Install 3.0… a Journey towards an end product…
So another mobile install, and more worries about how much space I have for wire….. things are always tight. I’ve been trying to plan this one out a bit, and started looking for ampacity charts. For the most part, they agree, but there’s always that question of “chassis wiring” versus whatever the other category is. …
Read More Wire gauge – what is really overkill?
About a year ago, I started cooking with cast iron after our pediatrician recommended it to help with my daughters iron levels. My biggest fear was cleanup- every cast iron pan I had seen in stores was sandy looking, and them at would seem to hold food and be a pain to clean. Enter the …
Read More In the kitchen… Cast Iron
So, I sold my scanner. I needed something that could monitor P25 Phase 2, in addition to Phase I and analog signals. I could have spent $600 or more on an SDS100 or SDS200 – and some day, I might… but looking at what I had on-hand, I wanted to see what I could do …
Read More SDRTrunk…
The experiment: Using a TV antenna directly as an amateur radio transceiver antenna. The background: Many websites and magazine articles exist wherein the author has disassembled a TV antenna and re-used the parts to construct a yagi-style antenna. Based on the feeding arrangement for the elements, it appeared that the basic TV antenna design is that of a …
Read More TV Antenna re-work… another old post worth sharing
OK – this is another issue that sparked quite a bit of discussion, and is worth putting out here for others to consider. Differential signals are a great concept – the transmitter transmits the signal between two wires, which connect directly to the receiver. The receiver then measures the DIFFERENCE (hence “differential”) between the two …
Read More On Differential Signalling between subsystems….
It took over a week, a complete network reconfiguration, and a lot of google searching to figure this one out. I wanted my MMDVM on P25 for a number of reasons. It should have been as easy as turning the mode on, and selecting a default host, right? well… maybe? It didn’t work that way …
Read More MMDVM on P25…
“Your codeplug will never be complete” – a quote I saw on a site about amateur radio DMR codeplug generation. I’ll argue against that thought. I wish I could get all of the background info I wanted in here – but I haven’t had the training I would like. There are entire Motorola hosted courses …
Read More Some thoughts on codeplug design and layout
Honestly, DMR is getting me excited about UHF/VHF amateur radio again. It’s not a NEW technology by any means, but the concept is really cool – I can have a drivetime chat with my buddies in Ohio, Alabama, and Iowa – assuming they have access to the repeaters. The biggest challenge was wrapping my head …
Read More DMR and Hotspots…. something else to break?