I received some of the pictures today using an HT with an Arrow II Yagi.

Most of us are on !amateur_radio@lemmy.radio.

They don’t come with the ability to transmit outside the ham bands from Yaesu or Icom. Somebody has modified them. It’s known as the MARS or CAP mod.

The transceiver ICs they usually use are designed for commercial radios and that is the frequency range that they typically cover. The ability to monitor other services is a useful feature.

The big version would be a lot of fun. That’s crazy that you can get an EIRP of 90 dBm from something that small. It could be used as a portable EME station.

It looks good. I was lazy and used one of those brush wall plates for mine.

For the grounding, you can get a small piece of copper flat bar. It’s not that expensive and will give a good, solid ground connection to the bulkhead connectors passing through it. You can through bolt a ground lug to the copper bar to connect the ground cable to.

Also, a tip for installing old work boxes. There are 4 small holes in the corner. Hold the front of the box against the wall and poke a small nail through the holes, then use a straight edge to draw lines between them. That will perfectly mark the hole you need to cut out.

I’ve still got mine somewhere. It’s a newer one that has a solderless breadboard in it.

For memory banks, I have one for my favorite repeaters at home and one for each area that I frequently travel to. I also have some banks for scanning like MURS/FRS/GMRS, airband and marine VHF. I have a Kenwood radio, so there are lots of memory banks, but you can’t put one channel in multiple banks. That means I have to make some duplicate channels if I want them in more than one bank.

Chirp runs fine on Ubuntu as long as it’s not too old. It needs GTK4 now. There are instructions on the Chirp wiki for installing it.

It’s a Dahua DVR with analog cameras. I have my firewall set so the DVR can only access the push notification server and my SMTP server.

Mine runs locally on the DVR. I wouldn’t trust any cloud service with my video.

My old setup only had normal motion detection. I couldn’t enable alerts with that because it would go off all night from the bugs swarming the IR LEDs on the cameras.

Sure, there are good uses.

I use the RADE V1 codec in FreeDV. It is an AI vocoder that packs high quality audio into 1500 Hz of bandwidth. It sounds much better than traditional codecs like AMBE or Codec 2.

Another one I use is AI motion detection for my security cameras. It recognises a vehicle or a person and significantly reduces the number of false alerts.

Hopefully they don’t try to take over the band. They are currently only authorized to use 430 MHz for emergency use and only for 24 hours.

That’s just the bad user interface design you see on a lot of radios.

If you can save up a little bit more money, you could get a Yaesu FT-60. They are currently on sale for $140 through the end of January. It’s an older model, but it performs much better that a cheap Chinese HT.

You can have separate banks for each city. That way you can scan just the repeaters for the city you are in. I have a radio with 1000 channels and no memory banks. I have to hook it up to the computer and reprogram it whenever I go to a different area.

On the Yaesu radios that support memory banks, you don’t have to use them. You can put the same channel in multiple banks or put every channel in one bank.

That’s a nice radio. It has memory banks, which are essential for managing the 1000 channels it holds. For some reason, Yaesu stopped putting memory banks in their newer radios. The US version is tri band, which is nice if you have any 1.25m repeaters nearby. The batteries are a bit expensive though.

That’s a good signal for an HT. Were you using a directional antenna?

Make sure auto slant is checked in QSSTV. It will help with the skewing.

You don’t need any special equipment. A baofeng or RTL-SDR will work fine. The stock antenna on a baofeng will pick up the ISS on a high elevation pass if you hold it sideways. A handheld yagi can be built from some scraps of wire and wood.

No, you need an audio interface such as a Signalink or Digirig.

You could also make a simple interface with a couple of audio cables connected to your sound card. You will need an L pad to reduce the line level from the computer down to microphone level for the radio. For some modes like SSTV, you can use the VOX function on your radio to transmit, Many other modes will need some sort of PTT control because VOX will be too slow.

Yes, you can use a vertical antenna, but it’s not ideal. There is a null overhead. They will work better on lower elevation passes. If the vertical is on an HT, you can hold it sideways to receive on a high elevation pass.

There are omnidirectional antennas for satellites such as a quadrifilar helix or turnstile antenna that will work very well for stronger signals like the ISS and the old NOAA satellites.