I recently decided to jump back into amateur radio with both feet. This last weekend I picked up a bunch of gear. And I have a couple of radios still on their way. Our little home office (man cave) is now looking like an actual ham shack. Previous to this, I was using a couple… — read more

I will say, messing with the Baofeng 888 radios was a major pain. The main problem was actually getting the second radio from the seller (KD8MST). And when I finally did get it, it didn’t work correctly. So I disassembled both my new (non-working) radio and my old (working) radio to see what the difference… — read more

This is incredible. I found a guy online who provides a “modification service” for Baofeng 888 handheld radios. This modification allows the use of these cheap radios as a node radio for ham operators such as myself who want to run a local VoIP node. I have two VoIP nodes (one Allstar and one IRLP).… — read more

I have sort of ditched local ham radio in favor of a couple different VoIP setups. I have two VoIP nodes… one is IRLP and one is AllStar. They both run on the raspberry Pi 2. I only have one node radio. It’s connected up to a dummy load instead of a regular antenna. Since… — read more

I had a little problem with my ham radio setup at home. I figured I’d post about it here just for kicks. I have two “base” radios at home. One is a dual-receive Yaesu FT-7900R that I use to monitor local repeaters. My second rig is an Alinco DR-135 that is connected to my Allstar… — read more

After concluding a couple of weeks ago that I wasn’t going to be able to do HF here at home, I sold all my HF gear on eBay. I sold my Yaesu FTdx1200, my Buddipole and my Comet antenna analyzer. I also sold my Signalink (since it’s intended use was on HF). I got pretty… — read more

I’ve learned a couple of things about running an Allstar node. Nothing too earth-shaking. 1. The mobile radio hanging off the node computer can spend a LOT of time transmitting. Typically a non-commercial ham radio is not rated for this sort of duty-cycle. But I’m hoping that having the power set to the lowest setting… — read more

Check out these three links: Allstar getting started info: https://allstarlink.org/getstarted.html URI: http://www.dmkeng.com/URI_Order_Page.htm Cables: http://www.uricables.com/ The Allstar folks are the ones who offer the ACID Linux distribution which has all the software you need to run a node. Much of it is preconfigured. It’s essentially CentOS 5.11. So, buy the URI and the right cable for… — read more

Because of a recent VHF/UHF radio purchase, I ended up with a “spare” dual-band radio. And, I’ve been having some fun lately monitoring the WIN System on a local repeater (that is connected via IRLP). So I figured I might try my hand at setting up an IRLP simplex node. I’ve had some experience with… — read more

For most ham radio operators… having a decent working HF station is somewhat of a holy grail. First, let me define HF for those not familiar. The term HF stands for “high frequency”. This is the type of ham radio where you can talk around the world. Other types of ham radio (like VHF and… — read more