Amateur Radio · VHF/UHF · Summits On The Air · Colorado Mountains · Adventure
Here comes Starlink! I’ve been reading a number of reports from the areas affected by the two major hurricanes (Helene and Milton). The North Carolina experience is particularly interesting because people have experienced the loss of communication and electrical service for several weeks. I can imagine this same thing happening in other parts of the … Read more
Way back in the Wayback machine, when I was working on getting my Technician license (in the 20th century), I recall looking at the frequency bands available to Techs. Technicians had operating privileges for everything above 50 MHz, which looked like a lot of useful spectrum to me. The idea at the time was that … Read more
Sometimes radio amateurs suggest that phonetics are not needed on VHF FM. (See examples here and here.) Sometimes it even sounds like it’s a bad thing to use phonetics on FM. It is inefficient and slows things down. I can see the logic behind this because with decent signal strength, demodulated FM audio is usually … Read more
The conventional wisdom in amateur radio is that we should not call CQ when using FM on the VHF and UHF bands, especially on repeaters. The reasoning for this is that during normal VHF/UHF FM operating, radio amateurs are tuned to a specific frequency and will easily hear a call on FM. Compare this to … Read more
One question we often hear from new hams (and maybe some not-so-new hams) is “why can’t I get into the repeater?” They get their hands on a new radio, set it up to use one of the local repeaters and it’s not working. Now what? There can be a whole bunch of reasons why you … Read more
Amateur adoption of Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) continues to increase, with a number of new innovations playing out. It was way back in 2012 when I wrote this article about DMR for CQ VHF Magazine: TRBO Hits the Amateur Bands. A few years ago, I picked up some used MOTOTRBO gear to use on our … Read more