HRN 426: Squelch

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What can you say about squelch? This should take about 5 minutes, tops.

What? it’s almost 3 hours? 😱 Well, we do go deep, and we goof around some. But yeah, we even cut some stuff out to just end the show and get to dinner.

The show begins at 13:35, with about 54 seconds left on the countdown

Before we dug into Squelch, we talked about this week’s MARS/Amateur Radio Interop activity, scheduled for Monday night through Saturday afternoon. It’s all on 60 meters, channel 1 (5330.5 kHz) with a nightly 10 PM nationwide broadcast (and some check-in stuff), and Noon Local Time ‘net’, Tuesday thru Saturday (so 4 regional ‘nets’. As I type this on Tuesday afternoon, we’ve had one ‘broadcast’ and one ‘net’. I’ll have some video and we’ll talk more on the next episode.

Then, it’s ‘all Squelch, all the time’. You might wish we had squelched ourselves a little earlier, but you do have playback control. Use it!

LINKS:

HRN 425: AnyTone AT-D878UVII Plus - 2nd Look

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Slide in about 5 minutes to skip the silent ‘testing’ period

The AnyTone AT-D878UVII Plus and the 578 mobile version are often cited as the ‘Best DMR radios in Amateur Radio. DMR - Digital Mobile Radio - in ham radio has progressed from the strictly commercial radios that were first brought into the amateur service to several lines and models designed to be ‘real’ ham radios, with features and operation more like the Icom, Kenwood, Yaesu and Alinco radios that we’ve been using for decades.

But how close did they come? Are they ‘real’ ham radios? And what is a ‘real’ ham radio, anyway?

Over the course of a swift 🙄 two hours, David W0DHG, Jim NO1PC and returning host Gary K4AAQ (yes, a slightly new call sign) review the pros and cons and make some comparisons.

The bottom line: let’s just say they do not agree.

Jeff Wittich AC4ZO... SK

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Jeff Wittich AC4ZO helped out on a lot of HamRadioNow episodes, enough to nearly be a co-host. He came with me to Dayton and Orlando several times. The first time, in 2007, he was the Dayton Virgin back when we were making shows on DVD.. While I think he enjoyed it, it was never his favorite thing to do. He did it because I asked him to. I asked him to because he was very good at it. He was very good at just about anything he tried to do.

Except… staying alive.

In the fall of 2020, Jeff was diagnosed with brain cancer. It was bad - Grade 4 Glioblastoma - incurable, with an average prognosis of about 2 years. He underwent surgery and radiation therapy to remove as much of the cancer as possible, but there was no way to remove all of it. As 2021 progressed, Jeff held his own for a while, but his strength was limited. He couldn’t work. In June, he was able to go with us to visit the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a dream trip. Shortly after that, though, his doctor discovered new cancer in his lungs and lymphatic system. Brain cancer usually doesn’t spread like that. It was a mystery, but worse, it robbed him of what might have been another year of life. Jeff passed away on August 2nd, 2021.

If you watch the videos, it will be obvious that Jeff was more than my video partner. He’d been my best friend since we met in the mid-90s, just after he got his ham license. He was a brilliant, mostly self-taught engineer, and he was always happy to help or share his knowledge, especially with new hams. We had a lot of fun together, and very few hard times.

We lost a good one. - Gary K4AAQ