Amateur Radio · VHF/UHF · Summits On The Air · Colorado Mountains · Adventure
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
On Saturday, we returned to the Most Radio Active Mountain in Colorado, Mount Herman (W0C/FR-063), for a combination VHF contest, SOTA activation and winter hike. Our radio crew consisted of Steve/WGØAT, Caleb/W4XEN, Joyce/KØJJW and me. I’ve worked Steve forty times on various summits and often when he was activating Mount Herman, but this is the … Read more
Here’s your handy list of North American Summits On The Air (SOTA) activities for 2017, as supplied by Guy N7UN: Jan 21-22rd: North America SOTA Winter Activity Weekend + ARRL Jan VHF Contest Apr 22-23: North America SOTA Spring Activity Weekend + QRPTTF Spring Event (Apr 22) Jun 10-11: North America SOTA Summer Activity Weekend + ARRL June VHF Contest … Read more
This post is a continuation of The Cacophony of Digital Voice Continues (Part 1), so you probably should read that one first. All of the popular amateur digital voice (DV) systems (D-STAR, DMR and YSF) use the AMBE vocoder (voice codec) technology. This technology was developed by Digital Voice Systems, Inc. and is proprietary technology … Read more
I’ve been thinking about activating Ormes Peak (W0C/FR-052) for a while now. It is not too difficult to get to and is not a difficult climb. After the Waldo Canyon fire (2012), the area was closed for several years, so I needed to be patient. Then I noticed that Don KØDRJ put an alert on … Read more
It wasn’t that long ago that I commented on the state of digital voice on the VHF/UHF ham bands: Digital Voice Balkanization. We have three main competing (incompatible) standards in the running: D-STAR, DMR and Yaesu System Fusion (YSF). At a high level, these three formats all do the same thing but there are significant … Read more