Month: March 2010

Tower?

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So, an opportunity has recently presented itself.

I have had a 32ft narrow gauge tower in the air since 2001 holding up some various Ham Radio antenna (3-element 10/15/20m beam + rotator & a 20/40/80m home-brew trap wire antenna). It is a tower that requires guy-wires when cranked up, and is not something I REALLY want to move anywhere. Plus it is ~17ft collapsed.

I was offered, in trade for some automotive work, what I estimate at being a 40-45ft crank up potentially self supporting aluminium tower. No idea what it was doing in its previous life…but it is down, on the ground, ready to go. Yay!

I am thinking this, combined with some vehicle mounting, and a nice UHF folded dipole antenna, can give me a pretty nice setup for the UHF repeater toy I just acquired.  Command vehicle here I come.

I still want a pneumatic or hydraulic cylinder type tower for the Unimog 🙂

Itinerant UHF Licensing

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I’ve been working lately on an application for licensing up some UHF frequencies (mainly Itinerant, Low Power, etc.) so I can have some breathing room on UHF commercial. I really don’t want to use a frequency coordinator (extra $$$ in someone else’s pocket), but it would be nice to have some freq to use for whatever.

I recently scored a Riton RRX-450 UHF 5Mhz split repeater…so I am super stoked about that. After some ‘hunting’ on the net, found some software, and used a ICOM programming cable to interface it with my USB port. Win! Fully programmable digitally synthesized UHF repeater, with duplexer. Even narrow band! (12.5kHz)

Out of curiosity I contacted one of the Frequency coordinators (office FCC appointed!) and they were very snarly towards my request. Perhaps actually having LMR background is intimidating. Either way, definitely not getting my dimes.

…and about that time

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The internet at home went down. Sigh…

I fought with the local AP’s for a bit…realized I could reach a LOT farther than I thought with a dish only 9ft HAAT, and then just left it with the old settings.

And an hour ago the net came back up. Router was fubar (my guess) as I could ping it, but couldn’t access an admin page or even NAT through it. Bummer!

Gah! Belkin Routers

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So, on the Dish Network* internet that I use at my residence, the remote wireless AP that I am connecting with is a  Belkin F5D7230-4 6000. It supports wireless B/G, bridging, and all the usual router features. And oh, BTW, it is a piece of garbage.

Reboot ~1-4 times a day depending upon use to keep the Internet WAN active.

Junkbox 101.

*Dish Network = 17dB 2.4Ghz Parabolic Antenna connected to a Ubiquity Bullet setup as a router for my local network. Thank you distant company with a static IP address and the lack of knowledge to setup even the most basic wireless security.