Week 9

FT2

So I went ahead and played around with FT2, and I'm not 100% how I feel about it. It is extremely fast, and I think it could be useful for some instances, but with structured exchanges, it is kind of difficult to determine if it makes sense to use it all the time.

You can see from the exchange with VA6DM above that, with a good signal on both sides, you can complete an exchange in around 11 seconds, which is really nice. Might be useful for "bonus" or "backup" contacts during a POTA activation. I'm not sure if I will do too much more with it until it is easier to operate on FT2 in WSJTX

Work on the CWARC portable repeater

This week, we finalized, well, mostly finalized anyway, the CWARC club mobile repeater. It's a pretty simple device made of two Yaesu FTM-150 radios, a mobile UHF duplexer, a repeater controller (not sure which one), and a Pelican-style box.

In addition to this box, which is shown above. The club also has a portable battery, a mast, and a GP-3 antenna. The interesting thing is that I was also able to install the box in the back of my car, plug it into my accessory port, and connect it to my mobile antenna to do some testing.

I hope to be able to write a longer write-up on this setup at a later date.

Due to my work on the mobile repeater, I was only able to make contacts via UHF and VHF on Monday this week, but I didn't do the formal exchange, so I'm not counting them in the log, but I am counting them toward my contact for the day.

POTA Activations

No POTA activations this week.

Totals

Here are the current week's total and the running totals for the entire project.