Thursday, March 09, 2006

IRLP Nodes in Salt Lake City

The following IRLP nodes are listed for Salt Lake City.

433.600 with 100.00 Hz Tone
448.400 with 88.500 Hz Tone
449.250 with 100.00 Hz Tone <== Very popular!
449.550 with 131.80 Hz Tone
449.750 with 100.00 Hz Tone

Some cities only have one node. We are lucky to have so many.

If you haven't tried IRLP, program in one of the above frequencies (I use 449.250) and the correct PL tone, then just wait for a time when the repeater is not busy, key up and say your call sign and the word "Listening". That's it!

You could get a reply from Australia, Japan, China, South America, or wherever. Keep a record of your contacts by call sign, time and location. One of these days you will find that you have worked all continents with nothing more than an HT radio and five watts! That's amazing. That sort of thing used to require a big antenna on the roof and a minimum of 100 watts of SSB HF power. PLUS good luck with the sunspot cycles and the weather. Oh, one more thing, you would have to do most of your contacts just before sunrise, just after sunset or at midnight.

By the way, log your calls using GMT or Zulu time. All ham radio contacts are logged in GMT by every ham all over the world. That way you do not have to convert from your time zone to some weird place somewhere on another continent. You only have to convert GMT to your local time zone.

Salt Lake City is always either 6 or 7 hours earlier than GMT, depending on daylight savings time. We are currently -7 hours from GMT. Therefore 2:25 PM in Salt Lake City is 9:25 PM GMT. Of course, in April we will switch to GMT -6 hours.

-N7OZH-

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

PC Programming Of YOUR Radio! (NEW TRICK)

Here is a neat trick. I recently found this note about how to use a pc (or tape recorder) to "trick" your radio into thinking its being cloned from another radio. This only works with radios that have a cloning feature built in.

Those radios have a cloning cable which is really just an audio cable. You connect the cable from the master radio's speaker jack to the slave radio's microphone jack and then begin the cloning procedure. Read on for how this can be done with only ONE radio!

This is a NEAT way to save your frequencies and settings in case they are ever lost out of the radio. I welcome your comments. N7OZH

*** Article follows ***

Hi there, recently I discovered a way to program the TH-79 from Kenwood by computer (or anything else that can do the following).

This is what you have to do: program the radio by hand. For example, program all your repeaters and local frequencies in it.

Then, set up a receiver at the same frequency as the radio and connect it to your PC. When you start cloning from the TH-79, simply record the file and store it.

Now, program the radio with other frequencies (i.e. from another country, police, ship-frequencies etc.) and do the same.

Anytime you want to program your radio with another set of channels, play the file in front of a mike or connected to another radio and "clone" the portable with its own files!
Works great!
73,
Thijs, PE1RLN
The Netherlands