GEARS E RX (146.250 MHz) recordings for 2026-01-01

Good afternoon, k6mfm. Happy new year. Yeah, the. The issue with those handhelds indoors is it's really tough to talk Simplex single channel, but you're making the repeater just fine. I can hear you loud and clear. Yeah. All you really need is a little better antenna. And there's all kinds of. All kinds of homemade things you can experiment with. Unless you want to get a bass radio, which, you know, if you can equip yourself with that, that's kind of nice. So were you able to get that Chirp software figured out? So that worked? Because I have a feeling you probably have a newer firmware version. So if you download the radio information first, and then you can put that other file that I sent you in a different tab, then you can just copy and paste everything to your radio's software, and it should work just fine.

Oh, yeah. Sometimes when you pull the, when you open the application and that box pops up for writing to the radio, it may default to a certain thing, but you can just change that, as you probably did. So cool. I'm glad you got it all figured out. Yeah. It's funny because way back in the day, they, they didn't have. There was no Chirp and all the radio software you had to buy, and it was super exp. And so mostly you just programmed everything by hand. And some, some of the radios were easier than others, but they're most of the ham. The ham, the ham brands like YAESU and icom, they're a little more user friendly with the interface. But now with chirp, I mean, you can program pretty much anything and it's, it's really n.

Yeah. One thing I do if. If this is helpful is I'll say, you know, I'll program something and I'll save it as a specific file. And so I'll have maybe two or three different files for different configurations. So if you ever want to change it, you know, you can just modify one file and upload it. And it's like if you're traveling and you want to put some other, you know, other repeaters from different states or whatever, that way you don't have to keep everything on there at once.

So this. This repeater we're on is part of the Gears Club. There's a club in town. They meet, I think, once a month. Once a month, once a week. I forget the schedule down at the library. And then they hold field day exercises in June, which is about emergency preparation and making contacts around the world. It's pretty fun to go to, but they have another repeater that they just upgraded, and it's got really good wide coverage. It's their west repeater. I think I labeled it w6rhc w on your list. And then they have a UHF box. And then the other, there's a search and rescue that's tied to the sheriff's department. What is that? W6SCR, I think. There's not a whole lot of activity on it. There's not a whole lot of activity on most of the repeaters in town. There's one In Yuba City, WD6AXM, I think that is pretty active. And then N6ICW, which is out of Sacramento, he's got a length repeater here, and it's pretty active, too. So there's all that list I sent you. Now, what do you have in your truck? What, What. What kind of radio is it?

Because it's possible. I'd have to. Look, it's possible that that can be programmed. Does it have a. Does the control head microphone all in one and it just plugs into a little unit?

Okay, I'll take a look. Because there's a lot of times there are ways of modifying them to go outside the band, but it depends if it's type accepted so I'll have to look and see. But the on the alternative thing is you can get. You could probably find a used ham mobile for pretty cheap that will do both.

Yeah, I know YAESU makes they have a couple of pretty slick mobile radios that are small, and you can mount the control head separately if you want to do that. But it just all depends on your budget, you know, how much you want to spend. And I can help you find something if you ever get to that point. So are your parents in town, you said, and they live in South Carolina, is that right? Okay, cool. South Carolina. That's a beautiful place. Oh, man. All right. Well, hey, welcome to the airwaves. Great job on getting your license. Sounds like you're eager to work on your general, which is great. And we'll have to figure out a repeater to maybe hang out on every now and then. But other than that, have a great New Year's with the family and probably see you Sunday.

Okay, matt. Take care. Good talking with you, k6m fm.