1)  I like to have DC to daylight coverage.  I am not sure why because really I spend most of my time listening to AM/FM and VHF government frequencies and then the VHF/UHF Ham radio frequencies.  But I like to know that if I really wanted to I could listen to other frequencies as well.

2) Great memory scanning capabilities are really important to me.  That is I want to be able to  skip particular channels,  have the option to hold a busy channel until its not busy,  and to wait for a selectable amount of time before proceeding to the next channel.  Also a priority channel is a really nice option.

3) AM/FM are requirements.  SSB and CW are nice to haves.

4) Multiple power options (as many as possible).  I prefer lithium as the primary rechargeable battery power as I personally have never had very good luck with NIxx batteries.  Also being able to power from Alkaline batteries in an emergency is very nice option to have.

5) Submersible and very rugged (I have really been spoiled by the Yaseu VR-7 and VR-8 radios).

6) I really like a dedicated volume and squelch knob but as the HT’s get smaller this seems to be a rarer thing to find.

7) HT’s can actually be too small.  Especially as I get older my fingers seem to get bigger and my vision is certainly not what it used to be.  So if the keys are too small, or the labeling is too small, or the display is too small it becomes much less fun to use.

Lighted keys is a great option.  I have found this to be true for my computer keyboards as well.  I just can’t imagine not having lighted keys now that I have them.

9) Programmable from a PC.  A minimum of being able to load the memories but other control functions are great as well such as setting the options for the backlight and contrast.

In my current line up of HT’s the oldest one is the Yaseu VX-7R.  I have had this HT for five years now and I really liked it and have enjoyed using it.  It has all of the scanning features that I like and it receives pretty much DC to daylight or at least to 999mhz.  I also really liked being able to listen to this HT in the shower and or out in the weather with no worry about it getting wet.  What I didn’t like about it was that the scanning functionality was unreliable.  By that I mean sometimes it just wouldn’t to a memory scan.  Other times it would only stop scanning on a busy channel for 2 seconds and then it would move on no matter how I had it configured.  Sometimes it would just completely forget all of its memories and I would have to reprogram it.  Not a really big deal as this could be done from a PC but this just reinforced my feeling that it wasn’t a reliable radio that I could count on in an emergency.  Also while this HT covered lower frequencies such as the  AM broadcast band and the HF radio bands it didn’t hear very well at those frequencies unless you attached a proper external antenna.  But if you did that you could easily overload the receiver with too much signal and be unable to hear the signal that you wanted.  The final straw was the poorly designed SMA connector.  It has little support for third party antennas and is easily broken.  I only did that once but once was enough.

So this started me down the road looking for another radio.  This led me to the Kenwood TH-F6 which I immediately fell in love with.  The memory scanning capabilities of this radio are second to none.  It is much easier to use and program then the VX-7R and I found that after using the radio for just a few days I no longer had consult the manual for most normal functions.  I  feel comfortable that I could take this HT into an emergency situation and be able to reprogram it on the fly without having the manual.  This HT become my day to day radio to use unless I was expecting severe conditions such as rain.  It also has much better sensitivity on the AM and lower HF bands then the VX-7R by far.  What I didn’t like about this radio was its size.  It is only 2/3 the size the VX-7R.  This means that the keypad is smaller and the display is smaller.  Also it seems to be much more fragile although I haven’t really had anything go wrong except for the external power connection.  Sometimes when I plug in the external power the radio seems to quit working for a while.  It has always come back but this seems to be a weak point according to some of the blogs about this radio.  The other issue with this radio is that it isn’t in any way water proof so its difficult to think of this as a tool for emergency use.  So I continued down the road looking for the perfect HT which led me to the VX-8DR.  It is thinner then the VX-7R but the keypad and display seem to be at least as big as the VX-7R.  It has the same robust construction and water proofing as the VX-7R which I really appreciate.  It also has a much more robust antenna mount than the VX-7R.  In addition with its built in AM antenna bar it actually does a pretty good job on the AM broadcast band and on 160 meters.  The scanning functions also seem to have been fixed so that it seems work as expected.  This is definitely my new favorite radio.  That doesn’t mean it is perfect.  After two weeks I still need to reference the manual to program easy things such as repeater access tones.  But most of the most used functions are easily accessible such as the squelch and volume functions even though they don’t have dedicated knobs.  As usual Yaesu has gone overboard with the latest and greatest.   This unit as optional blue tooth and GPS functions that you can add when you want to.  I have added the bluetooth functionality and I have been using it with my Plantronics headset and I am very satisfied.  I had to tell you that my past experience with bluetooth has really been or miss.  Especially with PC’s so my expectations with the HT were not too high.  But I was pleasantly surprised by how well and even more importantly how reliably it worked.  The separate programming socket is also a much better implementation then the strange combo programming/mic/speaker jack on the VX-7R.  The plug covers also seem to be much more robust and much less likely to be lost.  So far the only downside that I have found is the price.  If you were to purchase all of the options plus the radio you could easily spend close to $1000.00 which is a LOT of money.  But so far it seems to be a huge improvement over the VX-7R.  I  will update my impressions after using this for a few more months.

1) Make sure I knew what type of batteries I was using (This is actually more difficult than it sounds as the batteries I was using were no where to be found on the Internet).   After reading about the differences between AGM and GEL batteries I decided I would only be using AGM Batteries.  They seemed to have some advantages as to longevity when not being used and to have more capacity for the same size.  So ordered a size 24 79ah battery from West Mountain and a 18ah battery from http://www.chargingchargers.com/

2) So as I was only using AGM batteries I modified all of my PG40S’s to charge AGM Batteries.  In doing this and measuring the output from my Power Supply and the output from PG40S my power supply wasn’t quite putting out enough voltage.  At maximum voltage it was only putting out 14.10 volts and then when I turned on my radios and amplifiers the voltage dropped to 13.8.  According to the specs from West Mountain and from the AGM Battery manufactures you need at least 14.4 volts.  So I also went inside my MFJ 4225 power supply and adjusted it so that it produced 15.1 volts as full power.  Now even with a full load the voltage was still 14.4 which should be enough to correctly charge my AGM Batteries.

3) I had a couple of batteries one that appeared to be bad  (2.2 volts) and one that was showing a no load voltage of 12.4 volts.  I was hoping to use the Xtreme charger to bring them back to life.  Sadly the one battery was not salvageable but the other battery was.  It had been sitting around for at least six months maybe longer with no activity (No charging, not discharging).  So I left it on the Xtreme charger for 48 hours and then hooked it back up to my shack power system.  I Ran the radios for 8 hours and then allowed the PG40S to recharge it.  Will now begin to take regular measurements and see who long this battery lasts.

I found the that Xtreme charger produces quite a bit of noise on the ham bands.  Not too surprising so I still have not decided how I am going to integrate it into the power system.  But as it is a maintenance charger I will probably install a switch between the MFJ 4225 and the Pulse tech and only use the Pulse Tech once a week over night.

I will report back more details later….

What can you do with it ?  The PogoPlug is a single purpose appliance that allows you to share a disk drive with your friends and family via the PogoPlug web site.   This implementation gets around most problems involved with personal and hard ware firewalls and provides some degree of security for your data and network.

I installed it created some directories which I shared with some friends.  I put some photos on the attached drive and asked my friends to access them.   When you give someone access to your PogoPlug you must provide thier e-mail address.   The PogoPlug web site then sends them a URL that allows them to have access to what ever you have givent them access to.   So all external access goes through the external Pogo Web site.

I decided to do some experiments with larger files.  So I chose a 4gb video file and attempted to upload it to my PogoPlug from my Laptop.  This didn’t work very well as it was very very slow.  According to my upload dialog it was going to take 32 hours to complete the upload.   So I moved the disk drive to my laptop (a USB drive)  and copied it directly which took about five minutes.

I then put the Disk drive back on the PogoPlug and attempted to download the file from my laptop.  I was pleasantly surpried to see that it worked at almost the same rate as when the drive was plugged in directly to my laptop about seven minutes.  Interesting so I asked one of my friends to download the file over the Internet.   As soon as the download was started my Network became very very slow.  Just opeing the Google web site was taking as much as 2 minutes from my laptop.  So I pulled the plug on the PogoPlug and my network was restored to its former glory.. :)  My friend said the download was going very slowly on his end is download dialog indicating it was going to take more than 24 hours to download the file.

Very interesting.  It appears that the Pogo we site knows when you are on the same network as your Pogo plug and it bypasses the Internet trip in that case.  For a DSL connection though I could not recommend making large files available for download from your PogoPlug.

My next test will be to try and get the Pogo Plug to do more such as acting as a stand alone web server.  Stay tuned for my results….

I will be publishing pictures and how to’s shortly but breifly my system is strong enough to hold small yagis and verticals in fairly strong winds.  It can be quickly built or torn down in a matter of minutes and the height can be changed by adding or removing two feet sections of the tower to suit your needs.

In addition the Antenna mounting arrangement provides for a very flexible way to change antennas out as your needs change.  All of this can be done by one person in a matter of minutes.   And yet be stowed away in a car trunk or back of an SUV with little space being taken up.  It can even be used for more permanent installations by simply gluing or screwing the various pieces together.

I must give credit to Davnd Hannon KE7TTT though for his innovative use creation of the five way hub as that is a key part of my design as well.

So far I have downloaded the latest version of Power SDR to a Windows laptop and sucesfully compiled and ran it.  It appears to have a USB interface library so thats a good thing.  My next task is to take a look at what is going to be required to incorporate the SDR IQ into this software now that I have a working platform.

With  a Software Defined Radio I had high hopes that I could acquire future technological changes via software updates.

I had pined many times after one of the Flex Radios, Win Radios or in my more adventurous moments putting together one of the HPSDR from the TAPR group.  As a computer programmer both professionally and as a hobbyist I was very interested in that aspect as well so the FlexRadio design really appealed to me but alas I waited too long and they were priced out of my reach.

The RFSpace radio is very affordable and also basically open source for the API and software.   So it became my second choice.   But it turns out that the SDRIQ is a fairly scarce commodity.  So on one of my many trips to my local Ham Radio store I happend to spot them in stock I jumped on the chance to own this cutting edge piece of hardware.

Software Defined Radios are slowly evolving many of the Analog and Digital hybrid radio systems that we have all come to love.  Here are some interesting links to what others are thinking about this field.

Too many Radios in our consumer devices…

http://gigaom.com/2008/07/21/more-radios-on-fewer-chips/

Here is one of the many things Intel is thinking on this subject….
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2007/12/11/42781/intel-targets-wimax-with-software-radio-device.htm

I have several radios that I wanted to try it out with including an FT-897, 857 and 817.  It certainly was easy to set up per the instructions.  It took about 15 minutes to set up the first time but only because I was double checking everything.

For practice I took it down and put it back up several times and the average time dropped to about 5 minutes.

So I now set out to do some testing. The radio I decided to use at first was the FT-817. First testing VHF/UHF receive and then HF receive. The HF antenna appeared to have a pretty high Q which is to be expected and I was able to easily pull in WWV on 10mhz and the CW Beacons on 14.1, 18, 21 and 24mhz.

The VHF/UHF didn’t seem to be performing as well as I had hoped. I compared the receive signal from the Just In Case with the built in rubber ducky that came with the FT-817 and there just wasn’t much difference. So while the compact VHF/UHF antenna would fit nicely in the case I wanted better performance.

It turns out that I had a 5/8 wavlength mobile antenna for VHF/UHF so I wondered if I could get that to work in place of the antenna that came with the Just in Case. So I mounted it up did some SWR measurements did a sweep with my antenna analyzer across both bands and was satisfied that it should work… but would it ?

Sure enough it seemed to bring in about twice as much signal as the Sierra antenna. I was very satisfied. Of course it wouldn’t fit in the case so that is the disadvantage.