Aluminum. I have one and it's fairly good. Don't know if there's any difference between it and tubes, but it is riveted to the tuning capacitor, something that would be next to impossible with tubular stock.

FT897d with the built-in power supply. Simple, complete and not very expensive. Save up for IF filters down the road. Menu operation is a little fussy, but using it with a PC helps.

I have one, without the PSU. I bought the internal battery packs thinking I would be operating portable more often, but they really aren't very good. Much better to use a gell cell or other external battery if you want to go out in the wilderness.

Here's a fairly good explanation of how it works: http://aprsisce.wikidot.com/doc:aprs-messaging-explained

If we look at the raw data I just generated by sending a message from my TH-d72 to APRS Droid:


The first part is the standard routing from all the stations that digipeated and passed the message to the gateway, normal stuff. Notice the double colons ( :: ) then the recipient station's call (in this case K0JEG-5) and another colon. Anything that follows the single colon is text message until the {7 which is basically an EOL.

Note that several things need to happen on the gateway end for this all to work. 1st is the gateway has to be configured to gate message traffic from the Internet to RF. Next the gateway has to have heard from your station and gated it recently so that the APRS-IS knows where to route the message. The actual packet is fairly simple, just the :: and callsign makes it work.

One interesting side note. I stumbled on this when looking for a better explanation: APRS messaging to email! http://www.aprs-is.net/email.aspx That's wild!

Just passing along LED lighting that doesn't put out RFI out past a few inches.

Sylvania RGB LED strip lighting, picked up over the weekend at Costco. Comes in 4 2' lengths that interconnect, 12V, 2A wall wart and an IR remote box. I couldn't detect noise with my FT-817 (using stock antenna) until it was about 4-5 inches from the strip, and then only on 40 and 80 meters.

I'm using a tree mounted vertical in a pine tree next to my apartment. It's about 22' long with 2 19' radials (about 10 feet off the ground). Fed with a 4:1 UNUN, it works fairly well, but not great. I get a good match on 40-10 meters. The radials are visible but not offensively so (one attaches to the building with a screw, the other to the mount for a basketball hoop with a dogbone and a stiff wire). I think in a pinch they could have been sloped down from the unun and attached to branches, but I had permission to put it up so I wasn't worried about stealthyness. The tough part was getting it into the tree, up high and attached in a way that it wouldn't fall out. The easiest way I found was to borrow a bucket truck from work and use a P-hook screwed into the tree, but it still took about an hour of screwing around trying to keep the wire close to the tree trunk.

http://www.alliedboltinc.com/product/3-3/4-inch-P-HOUSE-HOOK~921.aspx

I think the next time I do this (which may be in a few months), I'm going to just get an LDG telescoping vertical and run it up next to the tree trunk and hope no one notices. I also think it would be better to use a tuner at the feed instead of an unun, but sometimes it's not that easy to do.

You could also wire in a key on the left click of a mouse and use the web site, if you don't have a radio.

I'm finding it useful to have the feedback of a decoded output while sending, it is forcing me to pay attention to what I'm sending, especially making sure the last dit or dah is correct.

One area that I'm interested in is Earth station automation. With short passes and cheap computing power it seems like we should be doing everything we can to optimize use by automating as much as possible. It's not as simple as waving an antenna around in the backyard, but it can be far more reliable without spending a lot of money.

Use the other (26 ga) ground wire to complete the circuit to the radio

white -> white
green -> red
black -> shield

I have the same setup, but with connectors. You need to run signal ground (pin 5 on a 9 pin serial) between the GPS and radio.

It's real. I saw it in a museum in Las Vegas: 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6gk1bgdv60avegb/08122008199_adjusted.jpg

Why do you think the builders of the Hoover Dam took all the time to build the star chart at the visitors' center? Because they knew Kirk and Spock would have a hard time converting our calendar to stardates.

True. But I think with a lot of DSP magic the size could be shrunk down to something the size of a Kenwood TH-d72 or equivalent. Heck, I'll bet the KX3 could have been made much smaller if it wasn't going to be a "kit" radio. In fact much of the space in a KX3 case is for batteries, which could be replaced with flat LiON packs and space for add-on accessories like the tuner. If the tuner were included it could also be put on a shielded section of the main board, which eliminates connectors and cables, etc.

Isn't part of the problem coming up with low cost linear amplifier designs? Because of the nature of FM you can run a non-linear amp and get away with it.

I'd love to see a hand held 10/6/2/70cm SSB/all mode HT. Certainly should be possible. But it wouldn't be cheap. These days it seems everyone is gushing about the Beofang $50 dual banders, not the high end D-star ready HTs. Of course, I'd also like to see satellite-like linear transponders on hilltops, not the re-purposed  commercial repeaters we have today, so what do I know?

Just don't use them to make a "splitter" for your Cable TV.

Good luck. My first thought when I saw one of these was that it would make an excellent IRLP node. should be possible to use the GPIO pins instead of a parallel port too.

I'm thinking about trying to adapt G-Predict to an LCD display and buttons for portable satellite use, but not sure I've got the programming ability.

Lots of ideas in that little box...

Other than the "friendly service" what's the opinion of Fry's? I make it a point to visit their Vegas store (and usually spend more there than at the tables), but it seems like they've cut back on the parts department (and PC parts department) the last time I was there.

The local 'shack has the Arduino micro for $16. I thought that's actually a good deal, but I figured someone else could make better use of it than I can.