I’ve been hanging around at some of the local radio clubs, namely the Peel Amateur Radio Club and the Halton Amateur Radio Club. I’ve actually been to a meeting at the Peel club, and I visited their ARES meeting last night to find out what that’s all about.
Found out what the (+) in my listing on the Rac Website is – that’s the method they’re using to identify the basic licences with HF priveledges. Didn’t stop the other club members from joking around that it must be some kind of important mark – the kind of thing that gets you volunteered for running Field Day.
I’m finally up and running with my data cable, and I’ve tested with my wife’s eTrex. Was pretty neat watching a bunch of callsigns start appearing and moving around on the map screen. This is going to be a LOT trickier on the eXplorist though, that sucker has a USB interface. I do believe that I can get it to send data to the radio (not sure about getting data FROM the radio though). There is a webpage that describes how to get the eXplorist working as a ‘real’ serial device over at http://www.msh-tools.com/softw.html, but I’m going to have to learn a bit more about this kind of thing before I can pull that off.
I’ve also been able to talk to the radio from my laptop computer, but not in a place that can see any radio signals, so I’ll play with that later.
Going to be a busy couple weeks coming up. I’ve had a few contacts on the brampton 2M repeater already, and some limited success hitting the Georgetown 70cm repeater.