Ham radio is a cyclical hobby for me, and when the interest comes it comes fast and strong. And so it did several weeks ago…
It started with a trip to Wabeno, WI to help support the Wisconsin Dual Sport Riders annual Ride 4 Research. It’s a dual-sport motorcycle event held in the backwoods, where there is very spotty cell coverage. It’s one of the only (maybe the only) events of it’s type to provide sag service. That means if your bike stops running or you get injured, we’re there to help get you & your bike out of there. “We” are ham radio folk who volunteer to sit in the woods with a radio and provide communications. A nice combination of camping and radio.
It’s a fun time and this was the second year for me. I decided that after using my Yaesu 857 last year I wanted a more modern and VHF/UHF focused radio for this year’s event. So I ended up with an Icom ID-50a and an ID-5100. Both worked very well, although I have yet to do much with D-Star.
Registering with D-Star
After the event I ended up getting a hotspot to provide a radio-to-internet link, and that meant I had to finally register with D-Star. That turned out to be far more involved than I expected. The instructions are simple, but things seem to depend on repeater owners doing the work, and after finding some dead links and submissions that seemed to go into a black hole I did finally get registered last night using the non-repeater affiliated link, so on to the hotspot!
Why D-Star
Despite the bumpy start I stick to my choice of D-Star as for digital voice mode for amateur radio. DMR is designed for commercial applications and is not a good fit for amateur radio.
However, there’s always been a commercial radio fetish in ham radio, as well as folks who love cheap gear and that combined with very cheap Chinese DMR radios means folks are flocking to DMR.
The reason why DMR is not a good fit is that is built on the idea that the participants and purposes for radio use are known in advance, and do not change. This means all the contacts (i.e. operators) and talk groups have to be installed on every radio. That is several hundred thousand contacts, and many, many talk groups. Both of which are changing all the time. In theory you can program these on the fly. I don’t think anyone is going to actually do that in the field unless their life depended on it.
For amateur radio that stuff all that data should be managed on servers, not on radios, and on D-Star it is.
DMR also lacks a really cool feature of D-Star which is the ability call to a callsign, and the D-Star system will route the call to the last repeater the callsign used.
I don’t know if Yaesu’s Fusion will do that, but Fusion is Yaesu only at this point. Icom, Kenwood and Alinco (receiver) all have D-Star radios.
Of course, the downside is that the centralized management in question needs to be up to snuff.
Meshtastic
So while I was busy doing other things Meshtastic appeared on the scene. These little computer/radio/gps combo devices operate on an unlicensed band to form impromptu mesh networks that provide texting capability. Similar to APRS in the ham world, but using very cheap radios at low power.
I had no idea this stuff was out there, but it is really a cool idea, and the gear is cheap and so far it seems to work pretty well. I got a Muzi Works H2T anniversary edition. A simple little thing with a 3d printed case, whip antenna, and a holster. Very light and small. Charges through USB C. I’ve had a bit of fun with it the last few days. It seemed to receiving ok but not getting out (hence the max retransmission errors you see) and I noticed today that it shipped with an 868mhz antenna instead of the required 915mhz antenna. I contacted them about a replacement, and they dropped one in the mail immediately.
I should warn you that if you go down this rabbit hole you need to prepare for slippery ground. I’ve already got 4 more units on order, including a 433mhz one that can be configured to do APRS. These modules and radios are cheap, and there are a ton of them out there. They come in different configurations, with keyboards and without, external antennas, raw boards or packaged units. Just take the moneys and send the radios!
The Meshtastic phone app is easy to use, and there are cool features to make it easy to set up and coordinate radios for a group. Multiple channels can be created, and encryption can be used to provide privacy. This seems like just the thing to keep the family in touch when we’re road tripping and away from cell coverage. Kids aren’t much for radio etiquette, but they do understand texting.
APRS – a really cool thing I want but don’t need
Automatic Packet Reporting System is a cool set of tech that provides some really neat services. Basic SMS (including interoperability with cell phone SMS), position tracking, and a few other things that are super useful in places and cases where cell phones don’t work. I’m not usually in those places, and when I am I’m with my non-ham family, so Meshtastic is a better choice for me. APRS has better infrastructure, more features, and access to higher power radios. So I need to be there as well, right?
This led me to almost buy a TH-D75 from Kenwood. I tried and tried to like it in the store. The menus are irritating, it lacks niceties the ID-50 has, and in the end I could not buy it. The final deal breaker is that it requires a Windows computer to perform firmware upgrades. Nope.
Then I found a post on Mastodon about using a LilyGo LoRa module to do APRS. Ohhh… The firmware is here. Unit coming. More to follow, but a LilyGo module is a heck of a lot cheaper than a TH-D75, and will (should) work with the APRS.fi app on my phone.
QDX
So the last time I got into radio was 2022, and I started out wanting to learn morse code so I could do CW on the QRP-Labs.com QCX mini I’d bought back then. I LOVE the idea of QRP and being able to talk great distances using a very small primitive radio out in the middle of nowhere.
However, I don’t love the process of learning morse code so in the end I got on the air using my ft-857 and FT8.
FT8 started out just as a “hey let’s try this thing” sort of effort, but I quickly became addicted. It has the collecting contacts aspect of ham radio that I like, but it lacks the social awkwardness that voice ham radio often has, and there no ambiguity about how a QSO is supposed to go so there’s no worry about norms either. Fast and easy and I found it fun.
So when the radio bug resurfaced this year I got a QDX kit from QRP-Labs. Assembling it was easier than I expected. It works and everything, no spare parts left over, even. I have not yet gotten on the air because my yard is very antenna challenged.
I also hadn’t gotten on the air because it turned out my iPad is too restricted to allow CAT control of the radio. So my plans of field FT8 were hanging by a thread and then I learned about DigiPi.org. Another really cool project where $30 of Raspberry pi module can be turned into a hotspot that connects to the QDX to do FT8 on WSJTX software on the Raspberry Pi Zero which I can view via VNC on the iPad. The iPad can in turn use an app to provide accurate time back to the DigiPi to make FT8 work – it is a time-based protocol so accurate time is required for it to function.
Get it all working!
So I’ve got several irons in the fire here…more to follow as I get them working!
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