2m Simplex (146.520 MHz) recordings for 2025-12-01

Ah, yes. Looks like the start of another beautiful day in the beginning of a new month. 47 degrees up in the Galia and six MTM. Good morning.

Well, I was getting a pretty good Asian bounce this morning on FT8. Getting out to China, that was pretty cool. Had a lot of fun there for about an hour and a half. Hope everyone's having a Good morning. Kilo, November 6th, Mike, golf. Kilo. Good morning. Yeah, good morning. Yeah, I got up about 5, I guess I was playing FT8 and 8. Asia was. I was. I mean, I was getting pretty good into. Into China. I beat you guys to it at 3:06 this morning.

Well, I had 28 email and I had a, a couple of mail that came in the mail yesterday, the day before. Yeah. By the time I got done with the important one and knocking out after the email, yeah, it was time to get up anyway, so.

It's an excellent query. No, I did not install any washers and feel free to take it apart. It's very simple to look at, so yeah, no problem. But anyway, maybe it makes sense to pull it apart and hook the like the outside antenna thing directly to it. That way it will be longer. I agree with you. It seems like it's really short. The other option might be just to take that. I wonder if just taking that outside nut off would be enough. If it is, then, because on the inside where the SMA inserts into it, it kind of forms like an insert nut, so you'd just be tightening up against that. Anyway, so I don't understand why. I guess the plastic had to be a.

Certain thickness. But it doesn't seem like it protrudes enough. I agree. It's a good thing to try. Maybe even on my antenna out here. See if that makes a difference. Where I've hooked it up into that disk home. But if it's not hooked up correctly. Then all the communications I've been getting on my outside antenna. Have been because of. Just because I'm so close, you know, from my little node to the other node, you know, that. Would that be enough? Maybe work without an antenna? I don't know. But feel free to experiment. That's what they're for. And it's not a big deal. Even if something happens to that device. It's not a big deal. I really like it. If we can figure this out. So that's the reason that I wanted you to have it in your hands.

Yeah, I don't think that you need GPS to utilize the function of it. So that does give out position data and so forth there. So. So anyway, yeah, I would think hooking up an external one would be a problem. However, putting like the answer to that would be putting one up that was one of those, like, solar ones or whatever. You don't actually clean the whole device outside, in other words. So anyway, that would be the answer to that, I would think. But yeah, feel free to experiment with it. And that's what I was thinking is taking that nut off and trying it without the nut on it. So the only problem with that would have ever been is pushing the whole SMA thing back in. But I think you would have some limitations as to how far that would go.

Anyway, A lot of people. The only other comment I have regarding the GPS is that there's a lot of devices out there that do not include the GPS. Anyway, I guess that's all I got. PN6MGK.

Yeah. Okay. In the main settings on the device itself, through your Bluetooth, you should be able to find one that says position. And of course right now it says GPS enabled. I think is how I had it set. So you would have to put there's one that says fixed and then you put in the coordinates. I do believe so. Then you can put ambiguous coordinates. Don't have to be. You could put John's house anyway, you know what I mean? Whatever coordinates you want to put. I suppose so I think that's possible. We just gotta find that spot. Same way you've changed. You change it from long fast to medium fast and all that business. So, yeah, down here in Chico seems like everything's on medium fast. But there's a lot of people using long fast because it's the default setting too. So I do believe that long fast is what at St. John Mountain? There's one up there if someone can get into that.

And be able to hear it and all that business. And I'm sure I've heard done it here, Sacramento, and here, the San Francisco Bay area. So it'd be cool if people got into that one. But I haven't been able to get anything from my house. I've erased everything and started over to see if I could try to just reproduce my results. And I haven't. So I don't know. I sat down there at the search and rescue building where they have. Where they have. I haven't had my coffee yet. Working on it, though. At the search and rescue building, they have a device there. And on long, fast. It never recognized me. Once I moved it back to medium fast, it recognized me right away. And I was just sitting right across the street, little gravel area. I have my wisdom.

Window down so that I had a device in the window and just sitting there and trying to say some things a couple times and finally it picked me up. But as to whether it set it out along the network or not, I don't know. I hope so. But it did pop up as a node and I was getting the cloud indicator with a check mark in it, but no one ever responded. So anyway, they're kind of fun, but they seem like they're little finicky. And yeah, it would be fun to try to get the whole group together and get it working, but it just might be more more involved than I'd hoped. Can 6 MGK.

Yeah, I can move it over. It doesn't make any difference to me. Yeah, not, not a problem. I might switch out the nodes or something. I don't know. Try the other node. That, that or, or go up there and change that. Take the nut off like you said and attach it that way too. I don't know. Yeah, but I'm not opposed to changing it. I might get any results on medium fast. So even though I was, I had a whole bunch of them that, you know, recognized but not over the last, not over the Thanksgiving weekend, you know, like I was getting stuff on Thursday and Friday but I think after that it was dead. So unless all the nodes were shut off, which is possible, give them away and stuff, I don't know. But I have a 10,000 milliamp hour battery hooked up to mine so something's up on the.

Roof. I was going to recline the ladder and go get it and switch, you know, switch out the batteries every couple days. But that's not a good long term thing. But it was good enough for me. I didn't want to have to go up there and grab it like, you know, once a day. So about every three days is fine.

Anyways operating FT8 this morning, you know I was pretty happy about that. I got four new countries so I'm up to 73 countries now. That doesn't mean they're confirmed so fact only a couple of them confirmed. South Korea confirmed and Taiwan confirmed. But hey, one of them I've never, when I brought it up, you know I looked it up. It's Vanuatu and it's a D expedition, just the Expedition 2025 I guess they're there through the next few days. When I looked it up on QRZ I got into Asiatic Russia too. That was interesting. And Russia, the one Russia guy kept trying to come come back to me and he wouldn't listen to my response and that was kind of weird. And so finally after an hour and a half of him he must have come back to me about the fifth time he finally got me so I thought that was interesting.

But those are always fun. I need to figure out how to get into Europe. There was one European station that I could see -24 on FT8J. But I kept trying to get him because I don't think I've ever gotten a European station direct, at least on 40 meters. Maybe on 20 meters. I did at one point, but anyways, so that was kind of interesting. I could hear the Europe guy, but he couldn't hear me.

Yeah, I bet that you almost need, like, a solar metastic node, probably at the Magalia repeater site up, you know, a ways off the roof there or something. So that way there, you could hit that with your node and then it could possibly hit Robert. You know, I bet you it's something like that that would be required.

All right. Yeah. I'll turn on the other one here and see if I can do it to the other one. The other one here. I've already changed the one that's on the roof right now. The long fast. By the way, I'll change this other one, the long fast, and try to put the position in. The other one is the one I would leave at my house anyway, so it's not one that's easily transportable.

Yeah by the way there's there's more nodes on long fast I mean so like Jeremy and Orland but that's pretty far away so make one or two other people in that area. So then there's probably quite a few down here in Chico on there too but matter of nodes picking them up and all that stuff I don't know. So it doesn't take much to have these little nodes around. I'd be pretty interested in building one or something building a solar node or something. They even have a small little solar panel here but I know that they sell all complete units but those are a couple hundred dollars and I don't think I want to invest that kind of money at the moment. But when you buy these little nodes you know you can get them for pretty reasonable and you can get some of the ones that if I was building one on a repeater site or something I probably wanted to have like.

Like One of the one or two watt versions, something like that. A little more power, can 6 MTK.

Well, I did the same thing on mine. Let's see if it saves it in there. So anyway, and changed it to long, fast, and then here, in maybe about an hour, I'll bring it to the roof, switch it out.

So what I need is another battery pack. So that way there I bring up a full battery pack. You know, I'm going to bring down the other battery pack and charge it up, you know, and switch them out every couple days. That would work, but right now I just bring up the battery pack I have and switch it out up there. So and then bring it back down here and charge it for half dozen hours and it'll bring it back up. It seems to be working. But anyway, hopefully we get this thing working. I'm on long fast now.

Yeah. Well, you go into the. You wake it up. And by waking it up, you go into the message section and maybe you tap on. Tap on, like, say, long, fast or something like that. Anyways, just that alone should wake it up. You know, you send a message out or something like that. The way they wake up is if they receive something or if they transmit something, there might be a little bit of a. Of a, you know, a few seconds or maybe, I don't know, something to wake it up to. There's settings in there for all that stuff. I haven't figured it out, but anyway.

Yeah, most likely. Yeah. I can't predict what's gonna happen in a week, but, you know, or so. But, yeah, I was hoping so.

Yeah. So I sent out hello from Chico. I've been doing this all the time, trying to get response. I got the little check mark in the cloud. So at least one node is talking to the other node. So I can talk to myself really good.

Well, the only other news I got is I was playing around with that CW Worldwide contest over the weekend. I was playing around with it mostly yesterday, maybe a little bit on Saturday evening. But I managed to get like, 1919 contacts, 19 QSOs. A lot of them are from the United States, so that's no big deal. But the only countries that I got, I've gotten pretty much before Mexico, Canada, you know, typical kind of stuff. Japan, you know, so nothing spectacular there.

Yep. I actually think you'd like the way that some of these guys are running, like, on that contest stuff. I'm just operating by hand, trying to understand and hear that. Hear it. But like, a friend over here, Chris, said, yeah, he's using, you know, all the automatic stuff. So in order to get these guys that are. They're like 40 words a minute and stuff like that, where he's got like a remote device and got his call sign and everything programmed in already. And so he just has to copy the other call signs. That's all. You know, he can hit button number one for his call sign, button number two for like, 5, 9, 9, and our CQ zone, which is 3. So it's, you know, 5, 9, 9, AND then 3. And then, you know, maybe you set one up for Roger and that's it. There's nothing else. You move on to the next guy. So it's pretty fast. Real fast, in fact.

Well, I found that to be the case with all of them. Now we'll see when the new ICOM 7300 comes out. Supposed to have a CW decoder. Let's see if they can make it better. Maybe they can, but so far I haven't been like the Yaesu one and the FTDX10 isn't that good either. You gotta really, you know, pull off your RF gain, pull out the noise, stuff like that. And so the guy has to be really pretty close in order to hear him well to be able to decode it. Right. And then like you say, if he speeds up or slows down, he gets all confused. So yeah, it needs some work for sure. But so if you do decide to listen in again, hopefully you stick to like listening at like 25 words a minute, you know, and then learning it back at that speed. Or Hayek. And that's what all the new people are doing and learn. Like what I'm doing right now is basically just learning.

All the basic stuff, like for doing poda or something like that. Nothing like rag chewing kind of thing, you know. After you get all that down, which might take a year, then start working on something else, if you're interested in it, you know. I don't know. For me, I'm having fun just doing what I'm doing. But the speed is important. So if you learn it really slow, then you're going to be caught up in the whole oh G is two DAWs and the DIT and all that business. And you don't want to get into that. You just want to hear then know that to you just by the way it sounds, that's what you want. 6m she gets.

Yeah. For ragchu, it is like words like the, you know, da dit dit dit, da dit dit dit. After a while you hear that, da dit dit dit. You know, you know, that's da. You don't have to listen to each letter or something like that. Yeah, exactly what you do. And there's even words you pick up like when you're doing poda. I mean, it's easy to hear fine business, you know, did it.it dotted it. You know, it's easy to hear when someone says good luck or good afternoon, which happens all the time. They're just saying da, da dit di da da da dit dita. You know, that's a good afternoon. So you don't listen to each letter. You're listening to multiples of letters and stuff like that instead. So, yeah, I think that's a far better way for most of us to learn kind of. I'll call it conversational cw. What's practical.

Okay, I'll step it away for a couple of minutes. Kn6mgk. Yeah, we've been non stop on 97, so I haven't been paying attention. N6 npm. They're playing, they're playing games. Skip came in there for a few minutes and Larry came in there for a few minutes and. Yeah, then they're on the phone for a half an hour and haven't come back. That's that over the phone high school stuff. Ain't a big deal because.

Terry and the other Larry Rea and Ken and Mike. And of course, John and Jerry were out there before the rest of the guys come in there anyway. Yeah. Oh, there's Larry. Coming back in there doesn't work. We just continue on whether they're out there or not. If they want to not talk because I'm out there, that's okay with us. I like the thing that I heard the other day. You would have got a kick out of it. It was John Kennedy said it. Let me see if I can get it verbatim. I know. I wrote it down so I get it almost right. It says, when you argue with a fool, you just proved there are two of.

Yep. I'm subscribed to his. Anytime that he's on any type of a deal, I'm subscribed. I always get him. I. I love him to death. He's an Okie, but he's a damn smart one. And he comes up with all that stuff on his own. Let me tell you. They're all originals. You wouldn't hear it anywhere else, but right out of his mouth. And then. Then there's always some copycats like me, but. But I always give him the credit when it's due. And his latest book, which is my Christmas Present one of how to Test Positive for Stupid. I can't wait to read that one.

The cool part is he'll be out on the Senate floor giving somebody a ration in a Catholic manner. I mean, it's just. He's the greatest. The Bible's full of parables. Jesus used parables because there was always all kinds of idiots out in the marketplace spying on them. So he learned to speak alongside what you're saying so that most people don't get it. And Kennedy has a nice way of putting things that would be otherwise negative, but with a positive twist. He's great.

N6WIP.KN6MGK. Just letting you know I made the mesh exchange on the roof, so I'll be headed over south of town for a little while. But I'll take that other node with me, too. But it doesn't matter anyway. Some point I'll be back home. And I'll be back around here, probably working on my truck outside. KN6MGK.

Well, it's down to me and terry n6 ntm on on the hf side of the world. And when terry gets back, I'm signing off over there. And now you guys are gone. N6 ntm. That's the only person here in Joe. I love to rub it that way.

All right. Way to go. He's got the staple gun for it. Yep. You got all fresh wood primed, even. It's a pretty thin coat of prime, though. I'd put a coat of something on it so it matches your. I forget what they call it. Ship lack.

All right, I'm officially signed out of that situation. Well, I was misled this morning. I was looking at cyber Monday deals at Harbor Freight, and I seen that they put it, put a sale on their inverters, and it looked like there could be a savings of 500 bucks. So I was going to diddly bop down there and see if I was entitled. But I'm not, so doot, doot, doot. I still got $120 worth of coupons right here. I can use them all on one thing or combine them with any other sales. I love it when they do that. $120 re. You gotta. You gotta be a part of their on track.

In order to get that. But anyway, do do do. And I'd like to have their 30 foot 2700 pound or 27, 000, I forget now pound pulling rope. Except for it's not one of those Yankum style that stretch a little bit before they actually put a nice smooth application of pressure. Yeah. So I'm giving a bypass on that 1 inch 30 foot rope. That'd be nice to carry in the truck if you're cross country and with an rv. But I think I am going to get there.

Oh, I can't think of what you call it. Now, it is the same kind of rope except for it's only 9, 16 or something for a winch. They don't stretch either, but they're much lighter than a cable and there's hardly any damage if you do break it. And it's £29,000. So, yeah, I think I'll just put that on the winch and skip the 1 inch 30 foot rope.

Them.

Ra.

Forget one of those hormone salt injected chickens for the road trip home. Gotta have at least one of those. Salt and hormone injected from Costco. 4.99. Yep, yep. I got one sitting right here. Right now. We make chicken salad out of them and stuff like that. Yep. And then later on, later on we have to check in with the doctor to make sure our hormones are all straight. Since we're eating those hormone injectors. I mean, they got to be almost like a small turkey.

Yeah. Yeah. I didn't think you were headed somewhere. Where are you headed? Okay. Yeah. I wish I had known you were down here. I would have met you. Yeah, we were over at Panera, and then I went over to Costco, and now I'm home. Anyway. Yeah, Sunset molding, I think, over there. Yeah, we're all doing the same thing and going at different times. We should have coordinated this just a little bit better and had a nice Knobby's Burger or something. But I think you told me they're not any good anymore. Is that right, John?

Yeah, but they used to be closed on Mondays. I think a lot of places are open on the weekends or something, but I don't remember about them. I know there's all. I think the ownership changed and all that business, but. Yeah, that was a couple years ago. You were talking about going to Navis and. Never happened. Yeah, well, sometimes I gotta have a crisp twenty dollar bill in my pocket. Especially the way it used to be with Knobbies. They. They wanted cash. Only if I remember right. So lately I haven't really been carrying much.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But still would like to go in there one of these days and try it to see if it's anything like it was with a nice cheese curtain, all that business. But I'm guessing no I get good hamburgers elsewhere anymore. But still, they had the best one during that time when the lady was the owner and probably her husband or whatever. But anyway, I don't remember her name. But anyway, the place was slamming Dizzy all the time. So that's why it was number one rated pretty much in Chico. All right. Anyway, have a good trip. Kilo. November 6th. Might go off kilos.

Well, it makes sense. We were talking about you this morning when you were on 97. So you came back and said. Said something that we had to shut up real quick.

Yeah. Too much drama on HAM radio. Can't figure it out. I guess it's just like. Just like. What's that? Facebook. There's drama there. And back probably in the olden days, you know, I used to be able to call, like, call my aunt and tell her something, and she'd spread it all over to all of her friends and all the family before you knew it. So anyway, yeah, a lot of that stuff goes on just in humanity, I guess. So what do they call it? Like, gossip and all that stuff? Yeah, I don't like any of that myself.

Well, he wasn't listening. And I don't have an 80 meter antenna right now. I plan to put another one up. But one thing I'd mention, I think some of these guys are pretty old. I know. One thing that I've had to deal with is a guy who was a good friend of mine for quite a few years and then for some reason I don't know, he's gotten his 80s, started losing his mind a bit. Next thing you know he's like a totally different person. Even my dad was this way the last two years of his life. And so I kind of like, I feel like I lost my dad 2 years or close to it before he died. So I don't know what it is. But with some people, the dementia, Alzheimer's, those kinds of things, I'm not diagnosing anybody, but something changes in them and they're not the same anymore. KN6MGK.

Yeah, well, you won't be blaming it on age because you'll think you're normal. It'll be your other half there saying, hey, like, I've had this lady right now who. She knows what happened back then, but. And he passed away and she's still alive. So she's always telling me when she sees me, oh, remember him the way he was? Well, I just can't. You know when someone says certain things that are really derogatory and so forth, and you say some things. I can forgive people, and it's fine he's passed away, but I just don't forget it. So that's the way it is.

I don't know who that is. I watched him. Benny Hill. Does that count?

Yeah. That's unfortunate. All right, I'm gonna go back to what I was doing there, but have a safe trip into. Into this fine. This fine city that we have. Full of Democrats. Wish you the best of luck. Park at the very end there by the gas station area or something and walk in. That's what I always do. Try to. Try to stay away from all those yahoos. Too close, Anyway. All right. Seven, three for now, though. KN6MGK.

Hey, Jay, are you selling that tuner? That nice tuner you got? Ldg, I think it is. Ah. Why'd you do that? It was still worked on. Your 7300. Tuned something really good, like, I don't know, like a random wire. Well, Steve needs to tuner also. Yeah, Blake's listening. I like him and all, but, I mean, I need to tune her, too.

Well, so what would you get? Would you get the M8T200 or would you get the LDG200 if you were buying a portable tuner? I don't know. I think LDG might be the only one that offers that. The Mat tuner. Mat. That one is made, like, almost specifically for. And so you use the interface cable and it powers it up. The Mac comes with one. I think the LDG comes with one, too, but.

The one tuner that you had or you had allowed for batteries inside, too. So I don't know if I'd want it that way or not, because I surely wouldn't want to have to open it up and put new batteries in, because more than likely, I wouldn't use it very often.

Well, supposedly Main Trading is going to update their website with new used equipment today, so I'm going to be looking at that here in a moment too. I think I turned it off by like figuring out like long pressing or something like that on the top button or something like that, or the bottom button. I can't. If you, if you just short press it on the lower button, I know that'll reboot it or restart it or wake it up, but. Yeah, so anyway, to actually turn it off, I think it's like, you know, some long pressing of the top button or something like that. There's no manual, I told you, there's no manual for it or anything, so I have no idea.

Well, you might have to long press it and then short press it after that or something. I don't know. I've got this shut off. I just can't remember how or whatever. I just. I don't have to shut it off at all, so I'm not worried about it. That's interesting. So then, if you see Robert, can you and him talk back and forth? I'm in talk, but, you know, like text and he gets it and so on.

Well, you still should be able to send a message and get the little check mark in the cloud. And I doubt it would bother him if he got if he ended up getting if he was close enough to the node, he might get a little notification like, you know, a text come in type of thing on his phone. But if it's not close enough, maybe it'll be there for when it gets close. I get bothered all day long at night too. When I try to sleep, my phone goes off. Especially now that I put Facebook back on the stupid phone. They'll be.

Someone commenting at 2 in the morning. And of course it'll notify me because, you know, it wants me to know that someone put their dog out to go pee at 2 in the morning.

Anyway. It's just why I wouldn't want to mess around with Facebook, but seems like it's the way you have to sell things anymore. Trying to, anyway. So that's the way she is anyway. Like Craigslist. People don't use it as much as they used to.

Well, if you know someone who wants Dstar, there's a used ICOM ID 880, probably for 250 bucks on it. Looks like it's clean in a box, papers and all that on main trading. So anyway, it looks pretty clean, but I don't care for that. But anyway, I don't even familiar with. I think these were bought like 2017 or something like that. Yeah, I thought there might be one up in Chico already, but yeah, I think there was some thought about that. But it wouldn't be until next year, most likely, if it happens up there at St. John.

So you like the idea of the interface cable powering up the tuner, or would you rather have a battery powered one?