I had to rehome my blog on a new server since macOS Catalina is no longer supported by Apple or Brew on my Late 2011 Mac Mini…
Sadly, I thought I had backups of my earlier posts but that has not worked out and I will be starting fresh with this being my first post. The main focus of this blog will be to document my activities with Amateur Radio. I may also post about other things, possibly even politics from time to time.
Everything said here will be my opinion from my perspective.
This article assumes that you have a DMR radio and a Hot Spot running PI-Star already enabled for use with DMR. Let’s assume that you have a DMR radio and that you are interested in checking out the activity on some of the popular System Fusion reflectors like AmericaLink or CQ UK. I will take you though the steps to setup your PI-Star hotspot.
Before starting on these changes do an PI-Star I do recommend that you perform an update hotspot. Now scroll down to the MMDVMHost configuration and enable DMR2YSF as pictured below and apply changes.
Next scroll down to the DMR configuration. You likely will not need to change anything here. The only thing important is that you use the DMRGateway as the DMR Master. You can select any of the Brandmeister masters but I use the BM_United_States_3102 but others should work also. If you do make changes, then click on Apply changes before proceeding. You should see your DMR ID in place of the red strikeouts below.
Now scroll down to the Yaesu System Fusion configuration section. Here you will need to select that you want to start on. It could be our club reflector but it doesn’t have to be. If you transmit to the right talk group it will be automatically changed to the club reflector. You will need to turn off the UPPERCASE Hostfiles (which is the default.) After making these changes click on Apply changes.
The last thing you need to do here is an update of PI-Star. This is required because we changed the UPPERCASE Hostfiles setting (as noted by PI-Star.)
Your hotspot should be ready to go. Here is a snapshot of my hotspot for comparison. Be sure to look for the YSFGateway, DMR XMode, DMR2YSF, and the YSF Network information of the Admin panel.
The next part which turned out to be the most difficult for me just because I kind of forgot how to make changes to the D878.
First let’s add the new talk group (DIGITAL/Talk Groups): TG = 7002500, Name = IL_NGRMARC, Call Type = Group Call
Now write the new codeplug to your radio and you are ready to go. I would be sure that you are not connected to any static talk groups before trying.
Let me know if you have any questions.
I want to use my Heil Pro-Micro headset with my Xiegu G90 when operating portable. Normally I would go to the Heil website for information on interfacing my headset to a radio and unfortunately Heil does not have any information for any radio by Xiegu. So I started looking into how I could make the interface myself. The following is the pin out for the MIC Interface from the radio user guide.
Looking at this connector pin 1 is on the far right and counting up going to the left. There are two pins here that I am interested in for connecting to my headset; Pins 5 (MICE) and pin 6 (MIC). I will use a 3.5mm (1/8″) mono female jack, connecting the MICE (MIC Earth or return) to the shield and MIC to the tip. I am also interested in adding a PTT button so I can use pins 4 (PTT) and pin 7 (GND) for that function. The other signals are used for the button controls on the microphone that I will not be using. I put together the following simple diagram for how I plan to implement the interface.
I have a few small plastic boxes that I use for this type of project. For simplicity I decided to cut a short Ethernet CAT 5e to provide the connection to the radio. It would probably be better for the microphone input to use something like a RG-174 coax but I don’t know how to get that into an RG45 connector so I just decided to keep the cable to the radio fairly short. This is a very simple project and took less than an hour to complete. A photo of the tested and working interface box follows.
I might consider putting this in a smaller box just to reduce the space this takes up in my go box. Otherwise this is working great for my needs.
First of all I don’t know how to pronounce the name but I am saying XI-Goo. This radio is a very compact HF SDR transceiver (160M to 10M). I have only started playing with it but so far I am very impressed for a radio of this size. Here is a snapshot of the G90.
This is not going to be a review of all the capabilities of this radio but I will mention that it is capable of 20W SSB, has a waterfall for finding signals in the band, a built in automatic tuner, and a SWR scanner for characterizing an antenna! The sensitivity, selectivity, and audio are very good in my opinion. This radio is currently going for ~$450 US. I used to own a Yaesu FT-817D and these are not equivalent radios. The FT-817 includes 6M, 2M, 1.25cm, and 70cm and has a built in battery. The FT-817 does not have a built in tuner, the batteries take forever to charge, and the output is a maximum of 5W (2.5W using the internal battery.)
For me the features of the G90 are more inline with what I want to operate with portable. Xiegu is a fairly new manufacturer (as far as I know) so you may want to consider that it might be difficult to have any problems that you may have resolved with their products. My G90 appears to be working perfectly out of the box but it will take time to gauge the reliability. As always these are just my opinions. I suggest that you do your own research before buying anything. There are many YouTube videos on this radio (my favorite video so far) and you also can download a copy of the March 2020 QST Review of the radio here. I have been reading a lot of great things about this radio and the more I use mine the more impressed I am.
The 13 Colonies Special Event occurs annually around the 4th of July. The point of the event is to celebrate our independence from England. It is an event that I look forward to each year. There are stations operating from each of the 13 original colonies, hence the name of the event. All HF bands (except for 60M) are used and all modes of operation may be used (SSB, CW, RTTY, Digital, etc.) The exchange with a station is simple CALL SIGN, RST, STATE / PROVINCE or COUNTRY.
This is not a contest, but they will provide a certificate for a nominal fee confirming the contacts you made with each of the stations. Making contact with all 13 stations is considered a clean sweep. There are also two bonus stations WM3PEN (Philadelphia) and GB13COL (Great Britain.) The GB13COL station can often be difficult to get considering the distance in time and geography but can they are usually available on D-Star (REF063B). This year they were also working on DMR. This year was my first year completing my contact with GB13COL on HF. I made the contact using FT8 but it is still HF!
For more information or to see an example certificate head on over to their website http://www.13colonies.us/.
I added an auto tuner to my go box. While that works great the tuner needs to be connected to the same port on the radio (FT-857D) that is used for connecting to a computer for CAT control. In fact, this single port on the radio is shared between CAT control, tuner control, or interfacing with a linear amplifier. The following is a clipping from the FT-857D user’s manual discussing this port.
I did a bit of searching on the Internet to see if there was anyway to share this port between CAT and a tuner. I came across a webpage by K6XX that has a number of articles on ham radio topics including one about how you can use the microphone jack on the FT-857 for CAT. Basically there is a menu in the radio (Menu 059 “MIC SEL”) which on default is set to “NOR” (normal) that can be changed to “CAT”. This changes to two pins on the connector that are used for the microphone’s UP and DN buttons to RXD and TXD serial data. If these buttons on your microphone are important to you then this might not be a good solution for you.
Now that we have serial data in and out they are not RS232C compatible for talking with your computer but that is easily solved. K6XX provides a solution using a couple of transistors and three resistors as can be seen below in his diagram.
I mostly followed this for my interface box with the small addition of a momentary pushbutton (red button in the photo below) added in parallel to the PTT Input jack. Be sure to use the PTT GND (pin 7) for all grounds in the circuit with the exception of the microphone jack. A separate ground return is provided (pin 4) for the microphone. Another capability that can be added is adding another momentary push button to ground pin 8. This duplicates the power button on the control head. I did not find that would be useful for me.
This little box works perfectly. Now I just need an iPad logging app that will work for my go box!
Well the ARRL Field Day is over. It was a very different event this year. The COVID-19 pandemic forced it to be different. No large gatherings meant there wouldn’t be any 33A stations this year. At least I didn’t hear one. I think the largest group I heard was a 3A. Most of these operators were forced to work from home most as 1D stations, probably much more comfortable but without the comaraderie that you expect at field day. The ARRL amended the rules to allow 1D stations to earn points for contacting other 1D stations. Without this rule change I am not sure many hams would have participated.
I used field day this year to test out my new go box. I wanted to try and see how it would work with a couple of different antennas and at low power. Low power was important as my go box only has a 7AH battery. My setup was in our screen house with a vertical antenna.
Operating in the screen house went well. In the picture you might notice that a box tilted up. That is my MFJ-939Y tuner which was a late edition to the box box. I had to tilt it up since it was sitting on top of the radio’s speaker. After using the go box for a while, I decided I needed to make some tweaks, especially I needed to mount that tuner below the radio. After making those tweaks I moved to the back patio for the next go box test.
On the back patio with my tweaked go box using my BuddiStick Antenna and running 5 watts. The go box is working out great! I can easily carry this setup to any park, setup in a few minutes, and play radio for several hours. If I want to play longer or at higher power then I can bring along another battery or two. More details on the go box can be found in an earlier post.
I like the idea of operating a portable HF station. I have on a number of occasions packed up a radio and all of the necessary items to operate remotely (battery, antenna, coax, etc.) It is always an effort and I tend to take much more than I need just so I do not forget anything. In order to make this all a bit easier I decided to put together a “go box”. Now I have seen many go boxes and they usually consist of multiple radios with a power supply and seem to be on the larger side. I wanted to do something a bit smaller.
I decided to base my go box on a Yaesu FT-857D. This radio is all-band all-mode from 160M to 6M with 2M and 70cm, literally a Shack-in-a-box. I wanted something that would fit into a Apache 3800 case from Harbor Freight. The general layout for my go box is shown below.
The sketch does not show all of the wiring detail. Also not shown is the MFJ-939Y tuner which is mounted below the FT-857D. Originally I did not plan to include a battery in the go box but I found I had room for a small battery and that was a great addition to the go box. I can operate the go box for several hours at 10 watts or less without the need to lug another battery with me. If I want to operate higher power then I can use an external battery or power supply.
There are external connectors for power (Anderson Power Poles), two SO-239 connectors (HF, VHF/UHF), RJ45 Microphone connector, and a USB-C / USB charge ports in case I need to keep my iPad/iPhone charged for logging contacts.
I think this really turned out great for my needs. I put the go box into service for ARRL Field Day. Conditions were not great but I was still able to make contacts using the go box at 10 watts with my BuddiStick from my back yard. The whole package weighs less than 20 lbs. and takes only minutes to setup.
The obvious answer here is that KiwiSDR is a Software Definable Radio but what I think sets it apart from other SDRs is the ease of accessing them over the Internet with a well developed user interface that is controllable from a HTML-5 capable browser. This project started as a Kickstarter campaign in 2016. The Kiwi supports up to four simultaneous connections each with their own independently controlled audio and waterfall channels. An extension interface allows advanced signal decoding directly in the browser interface without installing additional software. Two of the popular extensions are the WSPR decoder and Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) signal direction finder.
Many Kiwi owners have made their SDRs available to the public. In fact there are several hundred of them around the world. The easiest way to find one is pick one from a map of the world map.kiwisdr.com. If you are interested in more information about Kiwi go to their website kiwisdr.com. You can even use Kiwi to find out what your signal sounds like around the world.
COVID-19 has stopped many activities that we all considered to be part of our normal existence. From going to work, dining out, to taking an Amateur Radio exam. Some clever hams using tools that were developed for the class room have started giving exams remotely. I am a volunteer examiner with one of our local clubs and we started hearing about remote testing and we decided to look into how it worked.
Dirk (W0RI) who is one of my fellow examiners and I even participated in a couple of remote testing sessions with a W5YI group in Texas. Participating in those sessions was very inciteful for both of us. The group was very welcoming, helpful, and willing to answer all of our questions. I just want to say I think that remote testing is absolutely necessary right now as we all do our best to navigate these difficult times. I think the sessions were well run and provided a valuable service to the community.
At the end of the day, I still prefer to do our face-to-face testing sessions with candidates. It has nothing to do with the integrity of testing but it has all to do with the personal interaction with new hams entering our community and making new friends. Don’t get me wrong, remote testing is here to stay. I am fortunate to live in an area where in normal times it is easy to find a testing session. There are those who live in places that require them to travel significant distances to test and for them remote testing is a terrific option.
Life will return to normal or at least our new normal but without a doubt many hams in the future will have received their ticket by attending a remote testing session. 73
