Wouxun KG-UV20R Dual-Band Mobile NEWS

The Wouxun KG-UV20R Dual-Band Mobile is it for real? Will it be a good value for a radio? Will it do packet? A lot of questions and maybe the will be answered soon if the news from www.wouxun.us is correct.

Wouxun has released a limited number of the mobile radio to dealers.
These samples are not FCC Certified yet and do not have
the required 2.5 kHz tuning step required for 2013 regulations.
BUT THE RADIO DOES NOW EXIST.

 It would be nice to have a value radio that could fill the needs of amateurs. I have had good results from the TYT UVF1 hand-held. I would be totaly surprised if this new mobile could do 9600baud packet. It should be able to do 1200 baud, but of course we will have to see. Check it out


www.wouxun.us

Field Day 2012

Field Day 2012 was even better than last year. We had our setup problems but got them worked out fairly quickly. We had 2 HF radios running and also had a Packet Radio station connected to a HSMM system. We ran Winlink through a HSMM-Mesh node to a computer running the email server. This demo worked great! We tested the system several times and even sent small pictures. All in all we can setup in a disaster and have communication capabilities. This was a good test of our equipment. We used a Kenwood TS-50 and an Alinco DX-70TH for HF. An Icom IC-2000 was the packet radio. There were 2 WRT54G routers and 2 laptops. The antennas consisted of a Buddy pole and a home made 20m dipole and the packet station used a mag mount antenna upside down. We had 6 group 27 deep cycle batteries and a couple of 12v 7ah SLA batteries for the routers. We must not forget about all the good food and good teamwork, this is what Field Day is all about!

3cx Software PBX for HSMM

I finally finished the installation of the software last night. 3CX uses a browser based management console to set up and configure the system and phones. This was relatively simple, after the small learning curve. I had it up and running with a soft phone on my Acer laptop running Windows7 Ultimate. I setup another soft phone on my other laptop, running Vista, and had it working on the same Mesh router. I ported all the required port forwarding that it called for and then expecting to have to change some routing settings in the second soft phone, I moved the cat5 cable to the second Mesh router and it still worked? Was that supposed to happen?   Not with my luck, but it did. I restarted everything from the two laptops and the two Mesh routers and when they rebooted everything still worked. I was thinking that it should be harder than this to setup. At this point everything is working as it should. I will give an update later after it has had some time to run. There is a very limited Windows versions that the software will run on, so be sure to check it out before you start.

http://www.3cx.com/

Yaesu FT-1D The New Digital 2 meter/440 HT

Here is the latest entry into the digital radio field. It looks like an interesting radio, but it looks like another problem with interoperability. I hope maybe some smart Hams will figure out a way to make all the different modes work together. It would be nice if we could have a upgradeable mode that we could build upon and have available for all brands of radio. I am glad another manufacture is moving forward with new radios for Amateur Radio, this does help the hobby. I still would like to see something from the open source community. On a side note the camera microphone could have some use with HSMM.

Check it out here: http://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/ht/0111.html


Features

• 5 watts on Both 2m/440
• Image Transmit (QVGA 320 × 240)
• Integrated GPS
• CTCSS/DCS Encode & Decode
• Weather Receiving with Weather Alert
• Analog and Digital
• Wide-band Receive 
• Optional Camera Microphone

Inverter Charger for the Battery Backup

I am using an older Heart Interface Freedom Combi Inverter/Charger. The model is Freedom 25 which is a 2500 watt unit. This unit has a three stage 130 amp charger. I have been running this for a couple of weeks now and have had no problems yet. I placed a temporary 110v GFCI to test from. I have run some short time tests of the inverter and it has preformed as expected. I have not finished the new shack that will use this backup power yet. There is a lot of work to be done to convert a building to a nice shack, and of course the job and work around the house seems to always get in the way! If this system works as planned I may have to expand and get a newer controller. I am also interested in solar. It would be possible to run the whole shack off grid. This is a future project.

Batteries for the Shack

I have moved forward with the battery back up for the shack. I have looked at several different batteries and configurations for this project. I believe that 6v golf cart batteries would be the best route to go, but of course I did not go with conventional wisdom. I went with the Deka DC27 12 volt deep cycle marine battery. These are about 75amp hour batteries. I have 6 of these for the battery box. I went this route because it would be easy to grab a couple to go remote site. Also the price was right. I built a battery box for these with some scrap wood and a pallet for the base. I will post some pictures later. I custom built the connection cables with 2/0 wires. I will also be running some short cables to the new shack I am building. This will let me run 12v items without having to use a power supply connected to the charger/inverter that I am using. The charger/inverter will be for another post.

Emergency Backup Power for the Shack

I am currently working on a backup battery system for the shack. I have been looking at many different ways to do this. I am planning on running most of the equipment on 12v dc. I am looking to start with some batteries and an inverter/charger. I would like to get solar working in the future. One thing I have found in researching this, is that there is a lot of information out there, but it can be confusing. If I can get this all working, it would give me a complete station that could be run without power coming into the shack. I am also looking at some generator options also. Stay tuned for more. 73

Windows XP Dying?

Every where I look I see an article talking about Windows XP dying. Could this be true? How could it be true? I have been working with Ubuntu and Windows 7 lately, but I still have some machines running XP. These computers will probably run XP till I can no longer keep the computer alive. This is because they are not really fast enough to use windows 7. These machines are also running radios and radio software, thus I do not have to worry to much about them getting sick with a virus or even a cold. So I guess until I get some faster machines to run the other day to day computing Windows XP will live on in my shack. So I guess Windows XP is not really dying, but a group of people are trying to help it die faster.

HSMM-Mesh display

The Henderson County HSMM Group had a small Mesh display at the Cave City KY Hamfest Saturday March 3. There was some interest and questions about it. It is always good to get out and display the system to get people talking about it.

Introduction to Data Communications An Interesting Book

 Introduction to Data Communications is a very interesting read by Eugene Blanchard. This online book does a very good job at explaining many mysteries in networking. He does a good job at explaining things in a not to difficult to understand way. If you want to learn more please check the book out. 

 http://learnat.sait.ab.ca/ict/txt_information/Intro2dcRev2/index.html