KI6ETL - Ham Radio Enthusiast

Last night I successfully passed the Element 3 exam for the General License. It has been just under a year since I got my Technician License. In this short period of time, I have learned a lot and met a lot of great people. I prepared for the exam by taking the FARS General License Class and we met one night a week, for 6 weeks. I'm sure we would have spread the class out longer, but there was a desire to get the tests taken before the July 1st question pool change.

It appears as if DL6KAC of ham-blog.de has come up with an interesting idea. He has created HAMigg, which is a social bookmarking site like digg.com but dedicated to ham radio! I think this could be very successful, as long as people get the word out. The name of the site doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but gets the purpose across to those familiar with its inspiration. I'll be watching the site, and likely submitting to it as well.

After writing "Kenwood Amateur Radio Division in Trouble?", I decided to make a call.

I just spoke with Phil at Kenwood USA. I had called him, because I've been curious if a new 1.2Ghz HT would be coming out anytime soon. Unfortunately he said that their current task list is as such:

- Revampin current product lines to be RoHS compliant. One driving force to be RoHS compliant, is to be able to sell some of the equipment in Europe.
- Finish work on a new HF rig and release it (~1yr out).
- Start working on other new equipement.

Overall he said that I shouldn't expect a 1.2Ghz radio for another 3 years. Phil's suggestion was to use SkyCommand (or similar) from my HT, to connect to a TS-2000 at home (if line-of-sight was available).

An interesting side-note was that originally the Kenwood TH-F6A was going to be a quad-band with 1.2Ghz. Apparently the engineers were able to get to be quad-band with anything more than .5 watts on 1.2Ghz. The team decided to remove the quad and leave it as a tri-band, which ended up being one of their best selling HT's ever.

I am confident that RoHS is important, and a good thing for Kenwood. Unfortunately this may cause them to slip behind the competition in the process. At the same time, it may provide them the excuse to skip a "generation" of technology.

Michael S. Higgins (K6AER) wrote an interesting article on eham.net regarding the possible dimise of Kenwood's Amateur Radio Division. I am personally very happy with my Kenwood HT, and would be very sad if they closed the division. K6AER's comments do seem valid, and he certainly has some very specific things to point to. I can only imagine that it is a difficult market to cater to, since development costs are likely high... small market... and high consumer expectations.

I doubt that this is really a problem just for Kenwood, but for all the manufacturers. The amateur radio is not exactly the booming hobby it has been in the past. I would imagine the best way to solve these issues is to get more people involved with the hobby, and for all ham's to personally contact the manufacturers to show interest.

Read the article on eham.net
**UPDATE** Read "Kenwood Busy with RoHS"

I'm not a huge fan of Puppy Linux, but it does have its place in the Linux world. In my opinion they have strayed too far from the standards of where config files and binaries are located on other distros.

Regardless of the above feelings, a new Puppy Linux distro has been created called Digipup. Digipup is designed for use by Ham Radio ethusiasts. The great advantage of this method of doing things, is it takes up very little space. A person could have the entire distribution installed on a cheap USB "thumb-drive", which can be transported with extreme easy and durability.

Review / Read More

Fred Atkinson (WB4AEJ) has posted an article regarding having a "Ham Domain", which is essentially what I have here www.ki6etl.org. I obviously believe it can be a fun and interesting addtion to the Ham Radio hobby. In his article he highlights QSL.net, which offers free web-hosting to "ham's". I obviously have done something a little more complicated, but this is a great option for people who do not care about making things fancy. I recommend checking out the article and make use of this great service.

I was impressed to see TAPR and APRS referenced in the Make Magazine blog!

It isn't anything terribly exciting or new... but it is nice to see Ham Radio things being publicized in the tech community. Its worth it, if it even brings one more person into the hamradio hobby.

I just got an email from APRSDepot about their new project regarding AVRS

Automated Voice Relay System

"When you send the command to APRSDEPOT like 'C [CALLSIGN-SSID]' (Example: 'C N6GOF-1' where N6GOF-1 is the party you want to reach) the system will automatically determine the IRLP Nodes that are nearest to the two parties (You and N6GOF-1 in the example above). Once that is determined it will then send messages to both parties with details on how to get interconnected (Node details for each party respectivley). In the event that the party your searching for has NOT been heard in the last 60 minutes, you will get an advisory message."

This seems like a great idea... but not necessarily the most efficient. It would be great if APRS were some how extended to provide people (optionally of course) with the frequency the other user was on. This would allow people to use repeaters or simplex to communicate, instead of tying up a IRLP node. Regardless, this is certainly a step in the right direction.

Apparently people found the "Making a Cable to Go Between a GPS device and the Kenwood TH-D7" useful, and have asked for information about making a data cable.

View of the front of the connector-side (not the best picture):

I discovered pocketAPRS recently and wanted to try it with my old Palm m100. It is at least 6 years old, so I wasn't sure if it was up to the challenge.

One of the most difficult things of this project, was finding the pocketAPRS software! Unfortunately the project was discontinued in 2004, making it difficult to track down. If you do enough Google hunting and searching, you should be able to find a copy some place on the net.

I installed pocketAPRS on the Palm, using the Palm Desktop... just like installing any other piece of software for the Palm OS.

Next I needed to figure out how to physcially connect the Palm m100 with the Kenwood TH-D7A. The Palm m100 I have came with a serial sync cable which looks ike this: