Subj : Re: Baofeng UV-5R To : StackFault From : Vk3jed Date : Thu May 16 2019 08:25 am -=> On 05-15-19 07:10, StackFault wrote to Vk3jed <=- St> Well, they are certainly curious. They have a hard time hearing faint St> SSB stations tho, and being french, this makes things even harder for St> them. With the help of a little script, they might be able to do some St> QSOs. Also, during field day, I may just try 6m or other shorter St> distance bands so they get to talk in french. Quebec is like in the St> middle of shakespearians, so it's kinda harder for that. Yeah, there's some challenges. VHF does have some advantages for introducing kids. I, myself, had to adapt ro AM and SSB audio. Unbeknown to me at the time, I have some auditory processing issues, but determination and practice have enabled me to have better than average ability to pull a weak signal out of the noise. You may also consider getting hold of a good DSP noide reduction unit. While very few can match my ears for digging signals out of the mud (and most actually get in the way!), I did find one that works well with me, so I bought one. It's a German made unit, manufactured by a company called Michels Engineering, IIRC. Vk> Has its place. Was a useful link hime while I was on that trip. :) Vk> Besides, in these days of wifi, being 700km from one's "access point" Vk> does impress the tech generation. :D St> I've red about it a little, will definitely give it a try sooner or St> later. Yeah, good for keeping in touch when in the middle of a huge country with no people. :D St> The very low noise floor in portable operations is really nice. On the St> other hand, I built my new house in the mountains, far from the city. St> Which gives me a noise floor below S4 and even quieter if I turn off my St> plasma TV and the couple LED bulbs I have. I need to find some bulbs St> that are RF quieter than those. I've also deployed the antenna farther St> for the house, it's a little longer coax run but it cuts the noise St> quite well. I'm not sure where you'e measuring S4 (on what band?). Only 80 metres (I don't have portable antennas for 160) could possibly have noise that high in the outback. Even on 40 metres, the needle doesn't move, unless there's a signal. And as I said, on higher frequencies, I'm frequently checking to see if the receiver is working, or the antenna is connected! :D St> I definitely needs to carry my gear more often, I find myself wanting St> to do radio but didn't bring it. I may add one of those telescopic St> fiberglass masts to my kit so I can deploy more easily. I guess one's St> kit is never complete :) Yeah, the "squid pole" mast. Very useful for putting wires in the sky. I have one or two kicking around, and have used verious wire antennas over the years. St> Yeah, these are Yeasu's modes mostly. Fusion is like the Icom's D-Star St> equivalent more or less while Wires-X can be compared to DMR. I still St> have to experiment with those modes. I went D-STAR, because it was first to market, and it works well, though the third party add-ons that give reflector operation and other capabilities really improves D-STAR. The native "callsign routing", though it works, has some issues, the biggest ones being blind transmissions (impossible to listen before transmitting) and multiple clashing conversations on the same gateway are possible. But the non Icom infrastructure is much better. An add-on to the Icom gateways enables true reflector operation, among other things. And a non Icom network (ircDDB) not only streamlines things, and allows the use of homebrew gateways, but another component allows callsign routing to be used to access DMR like talkgroups, without having to "connect" and "disconnect". Simply QSY, hit PTT and your talkgroup subscription follows, providing you maintain the callsign routing settings for the talkgroup. DMR came about when I won an online competition run by Hytera. They sent me 2 free DMR radios, and all I had to do was take them for a test drive and write a review, which I did. I don't have any newer Yaesu gear to try Fusion. WIRES-X probably won't fit in here, if it's anything like its predecessor, WIRES-II. The biggest issue for me was that the gateway software ran on Windows, a platform I find harder to manage in server/infrastructure applications. It didn't fit in well with my Linux based infrastructure. That said, WIRES-II did work very well, and I had a lot of fun with it, especially once I upgraded the gateway from Windows 98 to Windows XP. .... Oxymoron: 10K Fun Run. --- MultiMail/Win32 v0.49 .