Well I got up relatively early and cut 35 foot of WF103 and soldered a PL259 on one end. The hole in the ceiling above the radios won’t take the width of a plug but will – just as it turned out – take the cable. It now has one run of RG213 and three of WF103 and an RG58 and I reckon nothing else is going up that way now. My little Antex iron had no chance against the copper in the WF103 so I had to drag the reflow machine in from the workshop, overkill but it made a good joint. Got the co-linear set up and mounted and the VNA said 1.2 SWR on 2m (it only goes to 180MHz).
The radio was easy to install and is smaller than I’d imagined (but then I’d not taken any notice of the stated dimensions). I put the SWR meter inline and it agreed with the 1.2 SWR on 2m and said the same for 70cm.
The first thing the rig did was tell me that the micro SD card I fitted is bust so its in the bin. Another one worked fine. Mind you, I should have realised because I had one SD card that would not boot pi-star no matter how I tried – I guess its the same one. Other than that it does what they say it will and works fine in both analogue and C4FM, receive-wise anyway.
The FTM100DE is a neat little thing and fairly intuitive in its use. I’ve programmed in the two local repeaters, one 70cm fusion, the other 2m analogue and both work fine and safely stored in memory. Not actually talked on the radio yet apart from a couple of tests to see if I could get into the repeaters (no time today) but it seems all systems go and hopefully I’ll be able to join in on the local natter net next week.
Time to add YSF to the pi-star hotspot.