W8EMV - Whiskey Eight Echo Mike Victor

Operating notes: AABTS "One Helluva Ride" 2018-W28-6 (July 14, 2018)

I rode and drove SAG for the AABTS "One Helluva Ride" on Saturday, July 14, 2018 with Saul KE8DDR. We clocked 111 miles door to door, which included two stops at the Gregory rest stop and a scenic ride through Hell, MI on a road that was paved with good intentions.

My 5 watt Baofeng HT was useful for talk-in to reach George K9TRV and Dan KB6NU who were operating net control. I had earlier programmed in the WD8IEL Chelsea repeater into it using Chirp, so I was ready to go. The range of my HT inside the car was not very good, but it was good enough for its purposes getting started. The Chelsea repeater is located near the M-52 and I-94 interchange.

The ARROW club has some radios just for this purpose, so we installed them temporarily in my car. Last year I made a goal of getting a W8EMV plate on the car just for this reason, and I managed to successfully navigate the Michigan Secretary of State system for doing that (at a cost of $7 for the vanity plate - cheap).

The antenna we used was a 5/8 wave with a mag mount on the roof of the car and the antenna cable snaked through a crack in the window, from ARROW.

The radio we used was a 2m rig, a FT-2900R, from ARROW. The only thing I noticed was that the tuning knob was very easy to turn and I bumped it at least once knocking me off-frequency.

The SAG drivers didn't all use APRS this time as far as I could tell. I also didn't have enough space to set up a laptop + wifi + cell phone hotspot in the car. Perhaps next year that can be a goal.

Neither WD8IEL nor N8DUY are on Echolink, so there wasn't really any backup plan to use wifi to get access to the net. That said, N8DUY which was pressed into service mid-ride has excellent coverage of the whole county and beyond. I was able to hear N8DUY on the HT all the way to Gregory. Of course net control had a cell phone number so the backup plan was the phone network.

Saul KE8DDR and I joke that the Sunday night nets are the "fix your radio hour". It turned out that running a net for a ride gives you a chance to do the "fix your radio hour", "fix your bicycle hour", and "fix your repeater hour" all at once. He repaired two blown tubes, and helpfully ran shifts both driving and operating the radio.

Elsewhere on the net:

• Dan KB6NU writeup: ARROW provides public service communications
• Steve W8SFC writeup on ARROW list (login required)

Operating notes: using a parking structure to great advantage

Operating notes for Sunday, July 27 2014:

Keane KD8AOZ organized a class to show good use of 2m radios at All Hands Active on Sunday. Larry KD8MZM and I were there.

First up was programming the Baofeng UV-5R with Chirp. We noticed that the version of Chirp you get when you download the package from apt-get is very old (0.1) so we pulled down a new fresh copy from source from the distribution site, chirp.danplanet.com.

I showed folks how to use the Repeaterbook interface in Chirp to program a bunch of channels quickly, which was much less tedious than hand-coding them into the Baofeng or typing them into tables in Chirp directly. It does mean that Repeaterbook needs to be kept accurate and up to date.

Once we had three working radios we went to the top of the Liberty Square structure to see what we could see. Here I was able to try out a better antenna than the stock one on my radio, and also to get some altitude to help try to reach more distant stations. As it turns out, the top of that structure has a metal covering over the railing structure, which Keane pointed out would be useful to improve reception. I held the rig parallel t the antenna and keyed up the WD8IEL repeater run by the Chelsea Amateur Radio Club, which is about 15 miles away. It came through loud and clear - a much improved result over the normal reception!

All in all a good outing. I am planning to get a better antenna!