I haven’t been that into ham radio since moving out of Salem. I knew folks in Salem. The further away I move, the lower the percentage of people on the radio I actually know. In addition… my involvement\/usage declined quite a bit after getting married. Funny how that happens when you actually have<\/b> someone to talk to (as opposed to when you don’t).<\/p>\n
A couple of months ago I sold one of my two mobile radios and my HT to help offset the cost of the new PC that I built. This left me with one mobile radio, which I was using at home as a base. Since I use this radio with an indoor antenna, I don’t go above low power (5 watts). But that’s no problem because I can hit all the local repeaters with that just fine.<\/p>\n
The HT I sold was a Kenwood TH-F6A. Widely held (at one time) to be the best HT out there. It’s a tri-band radio that will transmit with a full 5 watts on 220. It has dual-receive and all sorts of nice things. I never liked it. The main reason was the lack of a physical squelch adjustment, and an inconveniently located volume control. To me, those two things totally deserve their own physical controls that are easy to manipulate.<\/p>\n
After selling these two radios, it wasn’t too long before I was kinda longing for a Yaesu FT-60R HT. I’ve had one of those before and really liked it. And it has nicely-placed squelch and volume controls. It’s also very well-built.<\/p>\n
So a couple of days ago I did it. I bought the FT-60R along with a number of accessories. I’ve always had spare batteries and quick-chargers for every HT that I’ve had. So I wanted to do that again. But this time instead of going with cheap knock-off accessories, I went with the name-brand Yaesu battery and quick-charger. Add to that a factory Yaesu speaker-mic, a Diamond after-market antenna, and an antenna pigtail\/adapter so that I can use the HT with standard external antennas.<\/p>\n
After this purchase I started thinking that, dang, I like<\/b> Yaesu products! Maybe I should sell my ICOM IC-208H base rig and replace it with a Yaesu too! However I also started thinking that, dang, that new Yaesu HT was spendy<\/b>. My poor allowance is going to be in the hole for awhile on that one.<\/p>\n
That’s when I made the decision to sell my ICOM base rig and use the new Yaesu HT for both base and mobile. No replacement necessary. I already have two really good mag-mount antennas. One for use at home and one to use in the car.<\/p>\n
One really<\/b> nice aspect to using an HT and a mag-mount for mobile use is… no installation. Slap it on and go! No issue with where to get power. No issue with where to mount the antenna. Perfect! Of course I won’t be able to work weak repeaters with that mobile setup. But it seems to me that the benefits are totally worth that tradeoff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I haven’t been that into ham radio since moving out of Salem. I knew folks in Salem. The further away I move, the lower the percentage of people on the radio I actually know. In addition… my involvement\/usage declined quite a bit after getting married. Funny how that happens when you actually have someone to … Continue reading “Ham radio equipment fun”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-88","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ham-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moondog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moondog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moondog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moondog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moondog.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/moondog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":216,"href":"https:\/\/moondog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions\/216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moondog.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moondog.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moondog.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}