So some buddies back in WA, have gotten into HAM Radio, and having fucked around with their shit, it seems like a good investment. A few hours studying, take your FCC exam and then you got some reliable commo when shit goes to hell. Anyone here got their license? What equipment are you running? I'm looking at: Yaesu VX-7R - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Source: en.wikipedia.org The Yaesu VX-7R is a handheld transceiver for use on the amateur radio bands. It is a "quad band" transceiver, capable of transmitting and receiving on the 50MHz (6 meters), 220MHz (1.25 meters), 144MHz (2 meters) & 440MHz (70 centimeters) bands. ...
There is a unit out there that is man portable like a SINGARS. That caught my eye. Im reading up on the requirements to get my license now.
Ya now, SINCGARS is made by in the building I work in? There are rah-rah posters of the damn thing all over the east end, where that division of the company is housed.
This sounds interesting. Please explain. The kinda like SINGARS part. The ability to use the same unit in both man portable and stationary intrigues me. As for the requirements it is pretty damn easy to get your Technician, just a 35 question written exam.
Do they still make SINGARS or is it all ASIP. Honestly, only time I ever worked with SINGARS was in Basic. After that it was all ASIP.
Every vehicle I've ever had as daily driver has had a CB in it. I've always wanted to move up to HAM, but the test and the price of the equipment was fairly daunting. If they've made the test a little easier, I may give it a shot.
My buddies did it in a weekend. Seriously, Studied and took the test in one weekend. Then again, one works for M$ and the other used to before he broke off to form his own company....
Hmm, this may be useful to lure potential victims that I can rob from. In return, I will grant them their lives.
Check out this thread for a indepth discussion on the subject Now how about getting my up to speed on what comms are being used in a line unit these days. Im talking from the Squad leader up to whats in the Strykers. Remember Im an old dinosaur. When I was in we were humping PRC 77s and had GRC 160s in the vehicles and we had just started to get the motorola units for squad leaders (cant remember the nomenclature).
I got my Technician license back in 2001 (back when everything else required morse code). I picked up a 2M rig but haven't used it much. Set up an 80m ground-plane antenna and used to receive stuff from all over the world, but got out of it when I moved out to where I am now (and have no room for an 80m antenna!). \ Interested in getting back into it for race-day communication (could probably get several of our regular volunteers trained up and through the test no problem). Really want to get into theory, but it's so hard to find the time now Interesting that the General test is now so easy, I might upgrade at the local hamfest next month. Would love to DX with some WFers, although then you'd know my call sign... ETA: You'd think more WFers would get into ham, what with our prepper constituency.
This is a good site for estimating signal propagation: http://www.ve2dbe.com/rmonline.html Also this one for frequency/wavelength: http://www.csgnetwork.com/freqwavelengthcalc.html
I work on SINCGARS radios. They are a dream to maintain, very well designed. And pretty smart to come up with upgrades every few years so the Army has to buy the new versions! My gradfather was into HAM radio big-time back in the day.
I got my Technician license back in junior high, btw. One thing I did with the R-392 was replace a lot of the 26A6 tubes with MPF-102 JFETs. They're a direct replacement but you have to solder them to a made-up tube base. For that I used male RS-232 pins mounted in a drilled piece of circuit board. I finally gave up on upgrading the R-392 because the frequency mixing system it uses leaves it almost deaf in certain parts of the spectrum, especially above 24 MHz or so.
