Kris’s Thoughts

Ham Radio is a hobby of mine. Again there are several sites on the web that discuss in detail some of the things below. This is mostly for those who know and use this technology.

VHF DXing – For those of you who feel the need to crank up the power and do some repeater DXing, please stop. This is rediculous. If you want a challenge, the do some simplex DX or VHF SSB DX. Just because you can “hit” a repeater a hundred miles away doesn’t mean that you aren’t tying up a few others that you can’t hear. There are still several repeaters out there that don’t have tone boards in use. Things get screwy enough when ducting occurs without the knuckelheads adding to the mix with the 12 element beams and the 200w finals.

Marking the whole freaking world with APRS objects. I am glad that you are glad that you have found out that you can create APRS objects. Likewise, that you want to mark your favorite repeater and use the frequency as the object name. These things can run us mobile users nuts.

I have a Kenwood D700 with a Garmin GPS III. Most of the time things are happy and fine until…. Someone decides to start using nonstandard naming techniques. Garmin waypoints as well as others like to be all UPPERCASE without any punctuation. Anything else causes errors with the unit. So as a courtesy to us Garmin mobile users, please consider this when creating and naming your objects.

While we are triming the APRS tree, what’s up with storybook length text tags? If you want to write war and peace, then do it in packet. Please keep your comment tags short and sweet. If you expect D700 users to read it, keep it under 27 characters. Even less for D7. Put the important stuff first and the b/s later in the tag. Otherwise you tag might windup cuto……………..

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 at 12:56 and is filed under Ham Radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.