Monday, January 21, 2013

TR-9000 frequency problem

Ran into a weird issue the other day on my TR-9000 when turning it on after a long time of being powered down. My band limits were set to 143.800-145.999. Seemed like the lower edge in the United States zone with the higher edge set to the Japan zone. Very weird. Found a PDF talking about mods on boxspringsonline.com though. One of which told how to modify the band limits and step size of the radio. Turns out, when power is applied to the radio, that is when it sets the limits. It's not when you turn the power switch on.

I had accidentally powered off my bench power supply when working in here one day for a short time. It must have been then when this funkiness happened. All I had to do to fix it was turn off the power supply and count out 5 seconds or so. Once I turned it back on and turned the radio on, I had the normal USA band limits of 143.800-148.995.

Don't ask me why that's the band limit. Every other radio I've ever owned has the usual 144-148Mhz. Obviously with those radios if you transmit right up against the limit you are going to have signal outside of the allowed frequencies. I guess Kenwood just trusted people to be honest?

Monday, January 14, 2013

Packet Hailing Channel

Hailing frequencies open captain!


http://nwdigitalradio.com/products/

Kidding, good talk. Skip a few minutes in to avoid an intro. I was skeptical of the UDR56k when it was first announced. When you can get converted wifi modules that can do several megabits in Ham Radio bands, 56K seemed a little slow, and pricy. I guess compared to the common 1200 baud equipment, it's super-fast though. $400 has always seemed a bit much for me.

It's probably a good price though. I'm not sure what it costs to produce but it's probably what the market can bear and there are a fair number of Hams out there with big enough toy budgets to afford to buy these. At least they're not $1000 COUGHICOMCOUGH

eBay has a number of listings for wireless modules for Arduinos listed. There are NRF24 (2.4ghz) modules, and 2.4ghz bluetooth modules and modules based on the TI C1100 and similar chips that can do 440 or 900mhz bands for very inexpensive. Obviously it's a completely different purpose than something like the UDR56K. But could be interesting for some short range modes. I wouldn't be surprised to see an APRS mode one day.


http://www.aprs.org/aprs-rfid.html
This is a little old at this point but first I've heard of it.
Using RFID tags to beacon on APRS when participating hams are in areas with the proper equipment.
It could be handy to use to keep track of people inside of a large building, or see when people are in
the club radio station. Tags are really cheap and readers can be very cheap too. (At least, assuming
the readers I have seen for $10 are compatible with the tags you buy into)

I'll try to post other talks I find interesting. I seem to be getting hit with a deluge of them lately.