A little sparse on 6 Meters, but wsprnet.org has some good maps showing recent contacts as well. Hopefully later today I'll have a 6M dipole up in the attic (been waiting for a cloudy/rainy day). Have some chores to do first though.

Actually, I would consider Elecraft continuing to improve a fairly old radio a good thing. If you're happy with the performance of your radio as it is, don't worry about it. The only grief this upgrade may cause you is a reduced price if you try to sell your radio in comparison to upgraded models.

As for the "big 3" upgrading their equipment, the only thing they tend to do is upgrade to new models. I don't know of any who continue to upgrade radios that have been on the market for years. I wish Yaesu would update the FT-897 and FT-817, but they continue to market them like they are something special. I'd be all over Elecraft radios if they had a better VHF/UHF solution (transverters that cost as much as an all-mode radio don't count), but as I hear more reports of how great the KX3 is (and watching all the firmware releases and bug fixes that happen in days) I'm getting worn down.

http://nwdigitalradio.com/ is ramping up production now. The Dstar dongles have been on the market for a few years now, although somewhat limited in what they do. Again, with the focus on voice, all the attention seems to come back to the AMBE chip, instead of focus on the radio side of it, being the GMSK modulation and getting a standard emission, like SSB or FM. The NW digital radio has a Dstar module (that has that chip in it because the protocol requires it), but the focus is on data, not voice.

Actually you should only activate outlets you intend to use. For one thing, you don't split the signal as much and might improve picture quality. If you happen to live at the end of a line any unterminated lines could cause reflections as well. Also, your cable TV line should be grounded/bonded to the electrical ground rod, along with your phone lines. This is more of a safety issue for the CATV installer, since if for some reason your neutral would be disconnected the cable drop would make an excellent substitute (for a while, anyway).

programming software can be found on Kenwood's web site, and it is possibke to build a serial cable that will interface with the 6a.

Another vote for a TH-F6a. I had one for years but finally sold it and upgraded to an FT-817. I had good luck listening to HF by  modifying an old aftermarket antenna with a Radio Shack 72" telescoping whip (long ago discontinued) and using a long counterpoise. A quick Google brings up http://www.buddipole.com/fetewh.html which might be a suitable substitute. The nice thing about the RS whip was that it was fairly light weight so it didn't strain the SMA connector much. It also could transmit on 2 Meters as a 1/2 wave if you measured it right.

Of course, you might also look at the FT-817. It's much larger, but you get transmit too!

OK, first off, I agree with your points. When I have enough saved up for an IC-9100 (hopefully later this year) it will have the Dstar module installed (although because there's 0 Dstar activity around here I'll be on 10 and 6 meters mostly). I'm absolutely serious, I want a Dstar radio and have for some time now.

However, my main argument against Dstar is that it is primarily (and presented as)  a digital voice mode. Who cares about voice these days? I have a box in my pocket that can download 10Mbps and upload 2Mbps. It can stream (bidirectionally) HD video. Meanwhile, the Dstar folks want me to spend a few hundred on a radio who's latest innovation is a GPS and a repeater database? That can stream telephone quality audio at a paltry 128Kbps? Where's the camera? When will we see an Android OS built in? If you look at today's HTs, they look a lot like cell phones did in the 1990s, with blocky text LCDs, rubber buttons and very thick. I don't really care about radio thickness, but an all-in-one communications device that connects at a reasonable speed to repeaters or nodes or whatever we want to call them could really push clubs to build out useful networks. One just needs to look at the success of APRS and the nearly nation-wide coverage it offers to show what happens with a generic network (yes, most people just beacon their position, but there's a lot of IM style messaging and DX spotting messages too), and that's just 2 lines of text.

When packet first came on the scene, most computers connected to dial-up modems were running at 300 baud. 1200bps (while in reality due to all the handshaking and hopping was very slow), seemed like a major step up and was only possible because we had the bandwidth to do it (recall that phone systems were only 4KHz wide while our FM band was set up for (as you point out) 25KHz channels. And if you could do some surgery on your radio you could even get to 9600bps! (of course there was no one else to talk to). Dstar seems to be a major step backward. I had a cell phone that could do 128Kbps in the early 90s. We're supposed to be pushing the state of the art in radio, not sitting back and watching the rest of the world pass us by. I'd say the weak signal HF modes are doing more to push the state of the art than Dstar. And don't tell me the tech is difficult and expensive. I work in an industry that has seen a revolution in wide band RF chips that can send out channels as wide as 100MHz just as easily as a few kilohertz. If cost is a factor, just use last year's chip. If the tech is difficult to comprehend, just download the application sheet.

Digital networks shouldn't be pigeonholed into "voice" "video" "data" etc. It's all just bits and bandwidth.

Would an exception be a tuner at the antenna instead of at the radio? Just thinking that with good quality coax (consistent impedance) the signal will lose less in the coax due to strange/less than idea mismatches.

Velcro strips, unless working outdoors where they will get muddy and stop working. Label cables with white electrical tape and sharpie on the cheap, or get a label maker that will do flags, like this one:

http://www.brother-usa.com/Labeling_Solutions/ModelDetail/7/PT1400/Overview#.UY-2zEkS1VU

Makes a very neat, hard to remove flag that can be put on one or both ends of a cable. Useful for keeping track of permanent installations too. Label tape is expensive though.

How useful are online spotting networks, really? Just watching WSPR propagation maps you can see great variances between different parts of the world at any given moment. Having a DX cluster that includes all people who log in, no matter where they happen to be, doesn't seem all that useful. It seems to me that a regional spotting network (maybe broken out by timezone) would be far more useful.

Then again, I'm not really all that well versed in DX and contesting, either.

Maybe, but I've seen many brown cabins surrounded by aspen groves (which are gray), and they really don't stand out much if at all. Most of the world is more brown and green than you might think.

Forest green would work too.

Paint the tower brown. If it's really a wooded location it will basically disappear in the brush.

Kind of a shame that we have to go through so much just to enjoy our hobby. Meanwhile, now that spring is in the air we awake to the sound of V-twins with straight pipes every Saturday, and no one seems to care.

There are a lot of variables in mag mounts, starting with what exactly you are mounting. A small 2M/70cm antenna with a very small wind profile will likely be fine, but make sure you get a magnet that will have enough holding force (IE, the biggest one you can get). I have a mag mount on my work truck that has held the antenna down in a parking garage (forgot to pull it off before entering), and actually bent the antenna and roof of the truck a little. But again, I bought a big mount that was meant for a much larger antenna.

Skype is easier (and can work with video calling too), but another option is a T-Mobile phone with WiFi calling. It works internationally over WiFi:
http://support.t-mobile.com/thread/38734?start=0&tstart=0

Many of the Android handsets support WiFi calling and if you pay upfront TMO will unlock it so she can change out the SIM card for a local number then use the TMO SIM card for calling home.