Radio progress

Wowza, what a day. I did a lot of APRS, followed by some Linux workarounds to program a radio, and finally I rounded it off with a purchase that should help me activate the Superior National Forest during my September trip.

APRS

To begin, I did some lunch-hour scouting around town for APRS nodes using my Baofeng tuned to the 2m frequency. I have the radio connected to a Digirig mobile and then that is connected via USB to my Pixel 8 smartphone running NA7Q's fork of APRSDroid. The reason for using a forked version of APRSDroid is the addition of an iGate and also Digirig support. This helped me out a lot!

To my amazement, I was able to pick up a mobile station, and also a person's home station from the outskirts of town. What a great way to light the fire for APRS - I'm not the only weirdo that is broadcasting my location! However, this hacked-together setup is not what I want my final implementation to be.

At home, I installed Direwolf on my NixOS laptop and built a minimal direwolf.conf file to run things. It's not without issue (particularly the GPS), but it properly will listen for traffic off the radio and send beacons and messages when requested by a client like Xastir.

Here's the simple config that I put together:

ADEVICE plughw:0,0
CHANNEL 0
MYCALL KF0UUY
MODEM 1200
PTT /dev/ttyUSB0 RTS

DIGIPEAT 0 0 ^WIDE[3-7]-[1-7]$|^TEST$ ^WIDE[12]-[12]$ TRACE

TBEACON EVERY=2:00 SYMBOL=car LAT=42^37.14N LONG=071^20.83W

With this, I was able to use a client APRS application and TX/RX from another radio I had!

This opens a lot of doors, and I think a great first-step is creating an iGate for my home - who knows, maybe Round Lake will become the hotspot for ham radio in the next few years and I'll have been prepared for it :)

Yaesu FTM-510 Programming

If I could go back in time to 1 week ago, I would have ordered an ICOM radio that supports chirp... However, that ship has sailed. I own a Yaesu FTM-510 and I don't want to program the darn thing by hand using the radio dials.

Like any Linux user does when there's a need to run proprietary Windows-only software, I installed Wine and Bottles. After grabbing the installer for the Yaesu FTM-510 specific software from the product page, I ran the setup.exe file in Bottles to create my program. It worked like a charm, besides some text scaling issues.

With the software installed, I grabbed a 16GB SD card and plugged it into the radio for a backup. After formatting the card and taking a backup, I transferred it to my PC running the Yaesu software. It imported just fine, and I was able to make changes to the memory groups and then re-upload it in the radio.

It worked like a treat - easy enough! However, I really don't want to do this too often because dealing with a tiny MicroSD card sucks.

HF Aspirations

As I pondered what I could do to activate the SNF during my September trip to the BWCA, I thought about my past trips with long, grueling portages. Do I really want a 6 pound radio with all the other weight in power and accessories to go with it?

No.

I did some soul-searching and I think that I will only be able to do a CW activation of the park using an HF QRP transceiver. For this, I picked up a mid-band variant of the QRP-Labs QMX - the kit. This little beauty is going to be my ticket to an activation without a horrible back ache!

The keen-eyed among you may have already spotted a few issues with this plan:

• I don't have a general class license
• I don't know CW
• I don't have any experience doing POTA

To address these things, I plan to study and take my general class license by the end of July. In addition, I'm starting to watch and practice CW - I'm on the brink of buying a paddle and an oscillator practice kit! Also, I will work on understanding the ways of POTA once I finish up my general.

I'm excited to have a kit to build, and this QRP-Labs QMX radio seems like an amazing way to get started with HF without taking the full plunge into the rig I'm currently eyeing up - the ICOM-7100.

Conclusion

A lot got done today, both short-term wins and long-term foundational accomplishments. I feel like I have some momentum with this hobby - I need to keep it up! 73!