I've still got my hopes up!

That said, I need a few more people if we're going to get this thing to work.

If you go through the threads here you'll find my original posting. We're really at a bit of a make or break point for putting together a hamfest in the Twin Cities in the next year. I have a few people who've gone to http://hamfestminnesota.org and expressed an interest in helping put together a hamfest for this next year. And a couple of people who've indicated that they want to be kept in the loop on what's happening. My preference would be that another 4 or 5 people sign up to help, and I'm looking to see if I can get a meeting set up this next month to see if we have all that we need to really get things rolling.

My own experience is related to running a couple of volunteer run, multi-day conventions. And I have no illusion that my experience is a great match for running an 8 hr or less event including a place for people to sell gear, possibly a test venue for people to look to upgrade licenses, or get a license in the first place. I think it would be great if there was a space for vendors to show new equipment off, and a place for other clubs, some ham radio related, and perhaps a few who are not, and perhaps even served agencies to be available to explain what they do, and perhaps explain how ham radio is, or is not, a critical resource. I'm kind of hoping that there's someone who can arrange for food to be available as well, most of the hams I know happen to like it to various levels of appreciation.

If any of this sounds interesting, and you'd like to help, I'd appreciate it if you would drop by http://hamfestminnesota.org and sign up to help out. You don't have to be a ham, but that's appreciated.

It's been over 7 years since there was a Minnesota Hamfest. We've gone through one of the deepest and longest solar minimums and seem to have come out of that going gangbusters on the air. Let's see if we can end the no Minnesota Hamfest cycle as well.

Thank you, and 73,

- Rusty - kc0vcu

While I suspect my fiancee would agree, I know a few ham wives who's husbands would be more likely to be at the mall while the wife is at the hamfest. Not as many as perhaps there should be, hi hi.

-Rusty - kc0vcu

About 5 or 6 years ago I participated in a forum topic about Hamfest Minnesota where I reported that due to various concerns the Twin Cities FM Club had decided not to host a hamfest that year, but they would consider it again.

A few things have changed since then, but one of them has not been that the club has decided to have a hamfest. Though one of the things that's changed is that the board is interested. Another thing that's changed is that I am on the board of directors for the TCFMC, and so I'm involved in discussions of all sorts related to the club.

Here's the problem. Right now the board doesn't have time to dedicate to running a hamfest. We know it is something that the hams in the Twin Cities Metro area would find of interest. However each of us is involved in several different things, and while we are interested in getting it going, we are going to need people who will step up and pitch in at pretty much every level.

That's where you come in. we don't ask that you be a member of the TCFMC, though we would appreciate it if you were. We don't even ask that you live in the twin cities if you want to help out with things that don't require being local to the Twin Cities. Granted it would be nice if you were to stop in for meetings and such related to the Hamfest, but I've worked on volunteer run conventions where some of the people running the convention didn't live within 500 miles of the twin cities, so I'm not inclined to think that's a hard requirement either.

I think it's obvious that experience running a hamfest is appreciated, but if you've helped run almost any volunteer run event, I'm pretty sure that the experience will be helpful, and may even provide an advantage that someone who's only run a hamfest doesn't have.

At the moment we are looking at the possibility of having Hamfest Minnesota return in September or October of 2013. If you would like to help out, or even if you're thinking, you know, I might be willing to help out, but I'm not sure I'll have the time, I would appreciate it if you would let us know.

I've set up a web page at http://www.hamfestminnesota.org/ or if you want to direct someone to the page over the air or over the phone, http://hfmn.org/ works just as well. The page has links to two sign up forms, one if you are interested, the other if you are willing to commit to helping out already. You don't have to give all the information on whichever page you choose where I have asked. we won't be handing the information out to other websites. If you are willing to commit to help out, and have experience, please let us know what that experience is.

If you are interested in what is happening with ham radio in the twin cities, the Twin Cities FM Club has a guest speaker Chris Petersen, K9EQ, who is going to discuss the transition of Television from analog to digital, and how when that happened he was able to get a repeater antenna placed some 800 feet up one of the Shoreview Twin Television towers. The meeting going to be on Monday, March 12 starting at 7:00 pm. We meet at the Ridgedale Library in Minnetonka, just south of the Ridgedale Mall. All are welcome.

Thank you and 73.

For an antenna idea, you might look at making a TV lead based J-Pole, taping it to a bike flagpole to get added height and something with better range than the HT rubber ducky.

I think even an end fed dipole would do better than the rubber ducky, strip back the appropriate amount of shield (19" or so) another appropriate distance down add two or three ferrite beads, and tape, or heat shrink the end fed dipole to the bike flag-pole.

You may find the information at http://www.aprs.net/vm/DOS/DIGIS.HTM of use in setting up your digipeater. The specifics of how you set up the characteristics are going to depend on the TNC you are using, for that you will need to go through the manual for the hardware.

I would also talk to the people running digipeaters and igates in the communities around you that you are going to be relaying to. The primary reason is to make sure that they know that there will be traffic from your area. It can also help with making sure that things are configured correctly to avoid traffic loops and other QRM.

On top of everything else it's an opportunity to see what other people are doing in the area.

Not sure why you are trying to send a continuous stream of nema strings, and I'm not sure it's a good idea in any case.

From the sounds of things you are reaching a ptt timeout on the MT1200, and if you are going to exceed that you may need to reprogram the radio to stop that function from kicking in.

Additionally you may be overloading some part of the transmitter by sending continuously, and that may be shutting the radio down. That's more likely if the transmit length varies by environment temperature. If that's the case, you may want to look at adding more cooling to the radio, or using a lower power setting to transmit. Which means a better antenna, etc.

I'm not seeing anything identifying what variety of radio the MT1200 is. If it is not built for continuous duty then you are very likely not going to be able to transmit continuously, or at least not reliably.

One question would by what are you trying to do that needs the continuous series of strings? Is it possible to do what you are trying to do with a packet every 5 seconds, or every time a direction changes by more than 10 degrees or velocity changes by more than 5 miles per hour? If you are using this to track how far GPS indicates a fixed/known position is 'drifting' to do Differential GPS, then you may want to program things so that you are sending only the drift every 5 seconds, or even every minute. It will take some time to apply that drift to whatever is being measured anyway, and over a 5 second period (once the receiver has stabilized) you should not be seeing measurable drift.

73,

~Rusty - kc0vcu

Additionally if there is an active i-gate in your area, working with the owner to determine what would be best to contribute, and seeing what hardware they are familiar with gives you the opportunity to set up good relations with someone who may be able to help you down the line. Either with similar hardware, or even in transitioning traffic to your i-gate where it makes sense.

Setting up a digipeater may be the best first step if you suspect that there is traffic in the area that is not getting onto the local i-gate. At the very least you will be able to start collecting data about what sort of a traffic load your site would be looking to support.

First, TT3 and TT3+ do not have the hardware necessary to decode packets. All they are using the receive signal for is to determine if there is a packet already being transmitted.

TinyTrak4 and the variation TT4D can do bi-directional packet translation, however there are at least two separate methods of doing that.

In the first method the tracker takes GPS strings and sends them, then decodes strings from the radio and puts waypoints on an attached GPS that supports them. This has worked for me with an eTrex Venture, but it won't be of any use for USB based GPS receivers (think TomTom, Garmin Nuvi, etc.) or pretty much by definition GPS Pucks.

The KISS TNC mode (a different firmware software that needs to be put on the TT4) simply converts packets heard over the radio into packets on a serial port, and vice versa. You will need a computer and software that decodes those packets. That software should also provide the features needed to transmit packets as well. It spits them out the serial port and the TT4 then sends the audio tones and ptt switch (as needed) to the radio. This can be used to send APRS positions, but the TT4 will not be converting position reports to packets, the software on the computer will need to do that.

A variation on this is to use software on the computer to map position information from a GPS receiver (you could even use bluetooth or usb connected receivers) and have it spit NEMA strings to the TT4. It then has to be able to accept position reports as 'waypoints' from the TT4 and could display them for you that way.

The TT4D ads a display to the TT4 (though there isn't a housing for that yet) and you can use that to receive packets and display position reports. There is the possibility of adding a keyboard to the setup, but I don't know if Byon has in mind a 4 to 16 button keypad or a full blown qwerty keyboard. Depending on what gets built into the setup, 'up'/'down'/'select'/'send' may be all you need.

I understand that some of the new OpenTrak products are doing some of the same things.

73,

~Rusty - kc0vcu

I don't know that it will work for you, but I've had good luck converting a TinyTrak 4 into a TinyTrak 4D. You need cable to wire to a 20x4 lcd display, and a 62 ohm resistor if you want the backlight on the display, it works without it, which may be fine in daylight when tracking a rocket. Housing and logging are not yet part of the design, but it does decode APRS position information.

The TT4 kit on Byons site, and he does sell everything else you need (not sure about the wire, but you could always strip a ribbon cable from a defunct ATA hard drive cable I would think.) The displays you can pick up on e-bay for about half the cost if you think that you can handle everything else. (Which if you are comfortable assembling a TT4 or even a TT3+ you should be able to handle.)

Actually it does handle some data, people have used it to pass short messages back and forth.

However it is not a method of communicating voice, and from what I can see at the moment does not have any support for data rates faster than 9600kbps.

Granted to get higher data rates than that in D-Star you have to go to 23cm, but it's very doable.

If DVSI ever decides to release the complete specification for AMBE (the voice mode codec used in D-Star) then you may see more people interested in using D-Star as a voice mode, and data mode digital platform. As it stands the license declares the information within the documentation to be proprietary.

Since no one has reverse engineered the codec, (yet) that means that the only people who can use or listen to voice transmitted via D-Star are people who buy the chip that does the decoding (or related software) from DVSI or a licensee. This is somewhat unusual in the amateur universe as it means that for 'random' users the content of the conversations is 'hidden' or 'obscured' which many people consider counter to the regulations surrounding amateur radio.

That said, I don't see any rush to buy products that use competing codecs in the amateur community. Commercial radios are available using APCO-25, though not a lot that you or I would consider 'reasonably priced' for the community. That said $1000 for a ID-1 seems a bit steep as well. Though there are a lot of even more expensive rigs that people use all around the world.

It's a bunch of arguments that have been fought over for years, and I suspect we will see resolution when the current APCO trunking systems start being phased out for whatever comes up 'next.'

There are radios that come with partial firmware to support operations beyond what they are marketed for. That partial firmware means that if you modify the radio to make use of that partial firmware, you are very likely going to end up not being able to make the best use of the additional features that you would enable.

As an example some radios do have the capability of transmitting in 6-meters, however the firmware does not include direct support for things like repeater offsets, etc. If you were to modify such a radio to make use of that capability you would very likely spend an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to get memories all set up for what you have enabled.

The question then becomes is the additional energy and time you expend worth the effort. You could claim that you are learning how to set up such a radio for additional spectrum, etc. Or that you are learning more about the amateur band involved. However you may also run into limitations of the radio itself that you have no control over and that the manufacturer did not advertise, because their own internal testing shows that the radio is not a good match for that use.

A given with doing such a modification is that you will be voiding your warantee. Should you need support for the radio outside of what you are able to provide, you will very likely find that the cost of a radio that included the feature you attempted to add would have cost significantly less than even the repair bill. Additionally if you have modified the radio to operate outside of the manufacturer's published specifications any licensed radio repair shop will either refuse to perform any service on the radio, or at best will return the radio to it's original capabilities. And it will likely cost you the price of the radio in man hours involved.

You have also been advised that increasing the transmit power of the radio, for example from 5 to 7 watts does not give you a noticeable improvement in range or signal quality. Going beyond that, you will find that there are far less expensive solutions to improving signal quality and range from an HT than increasing the transmitter power. J-polls, Yagi's, home-made dipole's even a solid wire cut to the appropriate length and mounted on the correct connector for an HT are all going to give you superior performance to any modification of an HT's transmitter power at the levels you are talking about.

If you elect to ignore the advice above and provided earlier, you will very likely be ignored in response to any questions regarding what you should do when your equipment fails to perform to the expectations you set.  Or more likely fails to perform at all as a result of those changes.

It would not surprise me if you found support elsewhere. You may even find a few people more than happy to walk you through all the steps necessary to turn that $500 HT into a wonderful paperweight. All of course in the name of experimentation and the advancement of your knowledge.

If you really are interested in determining what modifications you can do that may provide the improvements to the capabilities that you seem to be seeking, I'm afraid that most responsible Amateur operators are going to advise you to go through the schematic diagrams for the radio in question and with an understanding of how the various components you are removing, adding, changing, will affect the operation of that radio, put the resulting altered radio through a full test suite to confirm that it is not operating outside of the restrictions that you are authorized to operate in. I do think that you will learn far more along the lines of what you are trying to suggest you are interested in learning than you ever will by doing a couple of quick soldering tricks that someone suggests.

You also are receiving quite a few derisive responses here. The primary reason for that is that all too many hams have seen people who seem to think that a simple component add here, or removal there is going to open up lots of legitimate features that the manufacture of the radio is preventing the purchaser from experiencing.

Unfortunately many of us have seen all too many 'Amateur' radios being used by either legitimate hams, or pretenders to deliberately interfere with other service's use of their licensed spectrum. As noted other radio services restrict the variety of radios that may legitimately be used in that service. Unless the radio is already type accepted for even a service such as FRS or GMRS, using such a radio to transmit in that spectrum _is_ against federal regulations and when discovered _will_ make the operator of that radio liable for rather expensive fines. Many of those fines may also be applied 'per instance' of violation. So a $5000 fine for illegal transmission may quickly become a $15000 or even $50000 fine.

Legitimate Amateurs who want to help other Amateurs and curious prospective Amateurs are not interested in being accused of encouraging such activities. Even besides the prospect of being fined ourselves, we do not think that you should open yourself to that liability.

73,

-Rusty - kc0vcu

Not sure if this will help. Try wide2-2 rather than wide2-1. The second number is decremented by any system digipeting the packet, and when it hits some number (0?) it is no longer forwarded, including I think by the repeater that hits 0 with. I.e. if you set it to wide2-1 the first repeater it hits makes it wide2-0 and drops the packet. (I think, and I could be wrong.)

I think that may be sufficient. Let us know if that solves your problem.

I am making an assumption here, that there are people about who would be willing to provide me with corrections to my collection of thoughts and observations. One of the handiest pieces of advice I ever received was that if you don't know how to do something, write up what you think it should be, then let people who know better let you know where you went wrong. Additionally, I am pretty sure that the questions I have are far from uniquely my own.


I built the BLT tuner (redundant I know) and as I was wrapping up the build it occurred to me that it really would be a good idea to know how to use it.

The instruction package very nicely describes how to build the tuner. It also describes it's features very well, including pointing out that they were very happy to include the LED SWR indicator.

However I'm not seeing any 'how to use' instructions in the manual.

What follows here is 'theory' of operations. For Procedures look further down.

I realize that there is a bit of an art to getting the best use out of any tuner. However I'm really just looking for some 'basic' procedures.

As an example, I presume that I set the 'high/low' switch on the back of the receiver relative to the type of antenna I am using, or the type of feed line I am using. i.e. feeding a dipole with 300 ohm feedline, vs 450 ohm feedline. At the same time it could be distinguishing between using a 1:1 or 4:1 balun. In any case, I would suspect that in general it is a set once for your antenna configuration, then pretty much leave the setting alone. (presumably why the switch is in the back.)

Next up is the Tune/Operate switch on the front. My understanding is that you switch this to tune which dumps most of the RF from the radio to the resistors/dummy load in the tuner and uses a trivial amount of the power to load up the antenna and the remaining circuitry on the board is used to drive the D2 LED based upon the SWR set up by the remaining controls.

Next up are the controls for 'radio' and 'antenna'. My understanding here starts to get a bit fuzzy. These controls operate a variable capacitor each. The 'radio' one (C2 on the schematic) presumably works to match the radio center conductor to the L1 of the large toroid coil. By construction the center tap of L1 is physically connected to the shield from the radio connector. Antenna (or C3) adjusts across both ends of L1.

The mod to convert the tuner to a long wire (LW) tuner essentially puts a switch in between one of the binding posts and ground, shorting the connection when in LW mode, and leaving it open when in balanced configuration. The LW can be attached either through a co-axial cable to the center of a BNC, or directly to the binding post under the high/low switch, with the counterpoise connected to the outer shielding of the BNC, or the binding post under the lw/bal switch.

What follows is 'Procedures.' i.e. 'how to use this tuner in day to day operations.'

Configure high/low (and lw/bal if installed) switches for the appropriate antenna type. (connection or feed line type?)

Set your transmitter to the lowest power available, and either using a SWR meter between the radio and the tuner (optionally including the SWR meter on an ft-817) or by using the tuner's dummy load and tuner circuit start the 'tuning' process. (Not sure if this is correct for using the internal detector of the circuit. Presumably the LED is being powered by the reflected power of the circuit, and a greater power out of the radio will give a better indication on the LED. Also the circuit includes an integrated dummy load, which means you should be broadcasting as little power as the tuner will allow.)

Send a constant carrier (switched to CW mode and key on) at a frequency that is not in use and close to the frequency that you intend to use. (3-5 khz off?) Adjust C2 (Radio) and C3 (Antenna) till the SWR meter shows minimum SWR. If using the internal detector circuit, SWR is indicated by the intensity of LED D2. Brighter indicates higher SWR, and you're goal is to adjust C2 and C3 to a minimum intensity, possibly including no light emitted. (I may have this backwards, and that is the main reason for this 'question')

I am also not sure of the recommended process for operating C2 and C3. Start with both at far left, tune C2 to minimum, then tune C3, re-tune C2, then C3 again? Start with both at far right, then ...? Start with both at approximately half-way point then tune C2, leave then C3, and you are done?

Stop transmitting. Switch tuner to Operate. (This bypasses the dummy load and detector circuit) Change Mode to appropriate operational mode for type of operation intended (ssb-u/l, psk, rtty, etc) re-tune the radio to the intended frequency.

Commence operations. If you have an integrated SWR meter, or SWR meter in-line, you may wish to fine-tune the settings of C2 and C3 to provide minimum SWR to the radio.

If you have modified the labels on the front of the BLT, with a graduated scale, you may find it useful to record the frequency, and related levels for C2 and C3 to pre-tune the tuner for operations on this, or near by, frequencies at a later time with the current antenna configuration.

Related notes.

This tuner is designed to be used at QRP power levels. As a result you will generally want to keep the equipment between the transmitter and the tuner, or even to the antenna, at a minimum. SWR meters built into the radio are one thing. Power/SWR meters between the radio and the antenna (tuner) are going to draw power that you may not want to drop out of a QRP signal. (Hey, it's nice to watch needles move, but if it prevents you from having a QSO, it gets to be a loanly activity.)

Likewise for frequency meters.

And for those planning on feeding a beam from their rig you may want to think again about the number of connectors and related equipment that you contemplate driving over that feed line. Antenna switch controls, power for remote auto-tuner's, etc. should be run on separate sets of wire. If you need to run some of that over the same feed line that runs from your radio to the antenna, it's probably time to re-consider whether QRP is a good mode to operate in.

Feedback welcome.

73,

-Rusty - kc0vcu

I am not familiar with the Delphi GPS unit. I am also not sure what your requirements are for a GPS.

Based on the description the Delphi GPS with a USB port on it is not going to be useful with the TM-D700. (at least not directly. If you add a computer in between the two, it could work out, but I presume that you are looking for a different solution.)

If you are looking for a GPS with a navigation screen that gives you both where you are on the ground, as well as allowing you to see where other APRS users are, there are a few systems out there, though you may need to go with a used system off of e-bay. I know that some of the Garmin Street Pilot systems were usable.

If you are willing to work with the APRS information on the screen of the TM-D700, then you may be fine leaving the Delphi in place and using a puck to provide the GPS NEMA strings to the TM-D700. You can find a variety of pucks on the market for under $100. Deluo (www.deluoelectronics.com) sells a couple of serial pucks, as well as the internals if you want to build your own. (I'm not sure I would recommend that at this point for you, but that works for some other situations just fine.) The Garmin GPS 18 is another possibility.

Consider looking at the reviews of the various receivers here on e-ham as well.

73,

-Rusty - kc0vcu

I'm not familiar with the specifics of the software, but it would not surprise me if it were attempting to send it's output as AFSK audio out the speaker rather than attempting to send the string as a packet over the phones cell service connection.

I would suspect that the authors initially intended for it to be used by Win-CE PDA users to act as an interface between a gps device (including possibly a cf gps receiver) and a radio. Basically turning the pda into a TNC, and possibly including the ability to decode aprs messages (including location information, or even just text) for display on the screen. I don't know if they even considered the PDA being a cell phone with an IP network connection of it's own to send data across.

There are a couple of possible solutions. If you have access to the source code, and are willing to write some software, you could cobble together a solution using the code to convert the NEMA string to a mic message, then use some of the i-gate code that is out there to send the data across the phone's data connection to the servers.

Another solution would be to have some software periodically collect your cell phone's location information off the internet through Verizon's service, and convert that to the appropriate strings to send as a packet to the aprs server. This could be on almost any PC on the internet that you give the appropriate information on how to get the information from Verizon to.

There are instructions available for manually entering location information into the APRS system, and that could be used to write an application for the phone that completely eliminates the need to do mic conversions. It will make the packets involved larger, and will involve more traffic as I think that the process uses a TCP service rather than a UDP service which I think may be how APRS i-gates are transfering messages.

You may also have to build in some sort of conversion process to send aprs messages to your phone, if that is where you want to receive them. I suppose you could select some radius around where you are located, and every so many minutes have a server poll the APRS servers for new messages in that region, and send you the appropriate messages. Not sure if that would be easy or hard to do.

Mostly this is just some ideas. The developers for aprs-ce may have better news for you regarding your configuration.

73,

-Rusty - kc0vcu