I've carried a small handgun in my "go kit" for years! I never much cared what a served agency said, I was not at home, I was in a potential threatened area, after all, it was a DISASTER AREA, and I planned to protect myself and my gear.

If the served agency did show a concern, fine, I did not live to serve them anyway, I was there as a volunteer and if they did not need me, no problem.

ok, this may be an idea from the far left field, but, what if the amateur community as a whole, decided to boycott communities with anti-ham restriction. Thie boycott would extend to times of disaster too. The last time I looked, a tornado, flood, hurricane did not stop at the HOA property line, but if amateur support did, I have to wonder of deed restrictions would be lifted if the community knew they would receive less support than the neighbor subdivision.

"Not me. With copper you have to worry about lightning strikes, ground loops, etc. and have very limited bandwidth. Its about time they brought fiber into the homes where it can provide TV, telephone and Internet.

If you need it to function when the power is out then put it on a UPS. Very few of today's multi-line office phone systems will function without power anyway whether or not they are fiber or copper. "

Fiber to the home is still (Thank all that is Holy) many years away.

If a business fails to add a large UPS to the phone system, that is thier error, every phone system that I was involved with the sale, the option was available and the majority of businesses added a large UPS to the electronic KSU.

I carry a spool of cross-connect wire and at least one buttset in my go-kit.

The drive to mine the copper from under the streets of LA is financial, that copper is worth it weight in gold. Fiber cost less, you can stuff more data down the glass tube than the twisted pair, fiber is more data secure, but let one coal truck wipe of 5 phone poles in Podunk West bygawd Virginia, the entire state will be without telephone and internet access for weeks. Witness the island in Washington State that lost the fiber across a bridge a few years ago.

on the topic at hand, the simple answer is YES.

"Dopple-scan" and other methods work quite well to locate VHF and UHF signals. Then once you know a general location, us an "L-per" to get closer still. The L-Per is an AM receiver used to locate aircraft ELTs, but works nice on 146MHz.

With enough time, effort and money, you can link doppler devices using APRS.

I've used the DATAK dry transfer, they also come in pre assembled and plain, where common words are spelled out. You can find them at Parts Express www.partsexpress.com

I also use a Brother P-Touch. I print out the word, then use a sharp sissors to trip off the excess plastic. I trip very close to the characters. This gives the appearance of screeen characters and does not look like a 1968 Dymo lablemaker.

too late now, but you should have bought an Astron RS-35M, and done the modification to float a battery. The mod is a 35 cent resistor.

Using your supply, you will need to isolate the power supply from your battery should the power fail, otherwise the battery will wipe out the regulator.

Since you are pulling heavy current (20+ amps), you will need diodes rated at least 20 amps, then increase the output of the power supply to 14.5V to maintain a 13.8V source to the battery.

the dots problem is the VCO has come unlocked.

Kenwood used a potting material that absorbed moisture. The fix is very easy, but only if you are willing to take up the solder pencil.

First, you must open the radio, find the VCO section and litteraly remove all the parts in that section. The the board needs to be cleaned with a quality cleaning solution (Blue Shower, 1.1.1 trichlorotriflorthene[sic?], etc), then replace all the old parts with new ones if you cannot salvage the old.

All of this is found on the Kenwood Service Bulletin page.

I thought that OBN had croaked... oh well......

perhaps if you spelled Jack's name correctly, you would see that he has a fuse.net address.

JACK GIEHL
WB8BFS
2780 FIELDS ERTEL RD
LOVELAND OH 45140
jack_g@fuse.net

sorry to be a wet blanket, but you are making a big mistake to run a portable in the car.

Install a real mobile radio, you will be far better off in the long run.

My reasons are this; a portable radio will need an external antenna - coax run to the out side, power connection - save batteries, funny how those power connections exit the portable radio on the opposite end of the radio. Next, you are not going to like not being able to hear the little portable while driving, so next comes the external speaker, yet another cable exiting out yet another side of they handi-dandy portable toy. OH yes, to transmit, you will need to pick the radio up, with all the tangled wires, so you will now want an external microphone... STILL YET ANOTHER cable.

So, where are you going to put this mess? How about right in the middle of the passenger seat, instead of a passenger.

One of the major reason why new hams give up on the hobby is the portable radio.

trollin... trollin... trollin... keep this thread a trollin...

didn't APRSPoint also speak??

a couple of places to look for schematics, both are kinda hard to find, but look on the ePay site for older ARRL handbooks (pre-1975) and RCA Receiving Tube Manuals. The tube manual has schematics in the back of the book. RC-28, RC-29 are new enough to be current to 1974, and still be able to find NOS parts.

Transformers are going to be the hard to find parts, power supply and audio output needs transformers.

thats a nice set of suggestions, too bad the local ARES/RACES net manager says that the protocol is to check into a net with "Here Is - drop carrier, wait to see if anyone is talking, when give your info".

I like to wait until some ID 10 T checks in with "here is" and when he unkeys, I throw in my call.

we used to have these in the shop, but TODAY, I think that you will find 20MHz bandwidth a bit restricting. Personally, I would pass unless the scope was really cheap. As a reference point, you can pick up 100MHz Tektronix scopes for about $100.