Life with DMR Talker Alias
When I bought my first Tytera MD-380 in 2016, I wondered why there weren’t any call signs popping up on the radio display. Just cryptic ID numbers. Surely I’d missed a setting somewhere. From my experience with D-STAR, it never occurred to me that call signs might not be embedded into a digital voice mode. […]
Digital Voice Hotspot Addiction
Messing around with Internet-connected hotspots has become quite an addiction. Here’s a photo of my latest Digital Voice ham shack, as it were. Shown here are two DVMegas, a VHF DVAP, a DV4mini, and a SharkRF openSPOT. Most of the Raspberry Pi-based hotspots are running Pi-Star software, including the tiny Pi Zero peeking out from behind […]
Buster 1.1 for D-STAR on macOS
Buster is a macOS application for ham radio written by Jeremy McDermond, NH6Z. It lets you to connect to the D-STAR network without a radio. Hardware-wise, Buster works with the ThumbDV™ USB dongle on your local computer, or over a network-connected PiDV™ device (formerly DV3000). Last fall, Buster started to malfunction. Connections to many of […]
Back to Radio – Digital Voice
Fact—there are currently more than 700,000 FCC-licensed ham radio operators in the United States. But it’s also true that only a fraction of these operators are doing something ham radio-related at any given time. Admittedly, I’ll spend several years away from the hobby, and then all of sudden … bam … some new technology or […]
Resurrection of a Personal Weather Station
I recently ran across the Davis Vantage Vue compact weather station in the latest AES amateur radio catalog and decided to buy it to replace my old Scientific Oregon WMR-968, a station in total disrepair. Putting the new station together turned out to be easier than taking the old one apart. Besides being a huge spider convention, the bolts on the old […]
RadioLabs Super 909
I recently decided to replace my little portable shortwave radio, the Sangean ATS-505, with something better. My #1 requirement was to get something that didn’t have the “chuffing” problem. When using the tuning knob, the sound is muted between every frequency. My main use is to tune through the amateur radio bands, so chuffing is […]
Robbers Crash at Mother-In-Law’s House
On Thursday morning I was listening to the police scanner as it often makes for good background listening while working. All of a sudden there was a big police chase moving across Hamilton County that originated in southeast Indiana where suspects had just robbed an auto parts store. Anytime a chase crosses state lines it […]
Poor SuitSat
When originally hearing about SuitSat, the satellite made out of a spacesuit, I didn’t figure I’d bother trying to monitor it during its brief 2-4 day window of existence. Besides, I had just run across a slashdot post pointing to an ABC News article proclaiming SuitSat a dead animal. So while tooling around the ham […]