Radio, railways, stuff...

A couple of new arrivals, a (new) Yaesu FTM510D and an (old) Yaesu FRG9600. On the FTM510D it is unheard of for me to actually get something so new. New, yes, but usually at least a year after launch. But this is new new. I was actually about to order a FTM500D when, fortunately the advert for this poped up. And it is way ahead of my FTM100D that this is replacing. First off, I like the display. it's big but not too big, colourful and gives all the right information. Not shown here is the information you see from a memory chanel which includes the callsign (or whatever you program in), frequence, mode and tone. It seems to find the GPS a lot faster than the FTM100D or my FT5D. There are, of course a lot of variables, for example cold start times, or the fact that somehow the shack finds GPS hard despite the perfect sky view from SE to SW. (Mobile phones never seem to have an issue). But the FTM100D would sometimes not find a GPS signal in hours. The FT2D was even worse. I like the controls too, with volume top left and press for squelch. Menus are all easy to read, with the Func button top right having a quick press to a user definable short menu or long press for the full menu. The only downside for me, and this is due to how I installed it, is the top row of 6 buttonw cannot be read from my chair. But as one is power that leaves just 5 to memorise, hardly taxing. So, out with the new and in with the old, an FRG9600 scanner. I wanted a general VHF/UHF scanner for a while now and this one came up via a ham radio exchange website. Old but still very usable. For this, I rebuilt the discone in the loft that I had removed some time ago. I have yet to program the radio up - mostly with local airport frequencies and frequencies of the airways and such. I like this because although I have SDRs which are far more capable, this one I can just switch on at will with everything else off. It runs on a 12V PSU which is always on rather than the big PSU that runs the rigs.

Given there is a new DV gateway on 70cm near my QTH I wanted to add it to the MD380. The first issue is I had completely forgotten how! Remarkably, the radio has plenty of battery so it was duly plugged into the Windows PC via the TYT USB lead. The TYT software failed to find the radio and on checking Device Manager it showed no driver. Off to the web to find one. Nope. I found a link to nowhere, found a driver that didn't work, and another which would not even install. By now I was beginning to remember things about code plugs... Off to the Linux box then. I found Editcp with with that I found my memory! I had used this before but DMR isn't really my thing these days so it sort of fell off the disk when I upgraded PCs a couple of years ago. Anyway, Editcp found the radio without fuss and downloaded it. After remmebering all the places one needs to add stuff to add a single chanel I had oen set up for the new local gateway. But I can't get in... perhaps it is just too far. I tried via the collinear, still nothing. By now I had to consider that I simply programmed it wrong but then two station IDs appeared so it is receiving ok. The gateway is simplex, so it is probably just too far away and down in a dip. Odd things, brains, drip feeding memories of complicated tasks bit by bit and usually in the wrong sequence... must write it down this time!

Now the competition is over here is the best image I received during the Fram2 mission: I received several images in total including slides 1 through to 8, of which about half were full or nearly full images. The setup here was SatPC32 driving the TS2000X connected to a 70cm QFH antenna in the loft. This really needs to be outside but that will have to wait.