Have Radio Will Travel
When I was young (read “ancient history”), there was a television program called “Have Gun Will Travel”. I don’t remember seeing it, but the name stuck in my mind all these years. Now, as an amateur radio operator, I don’t like to shoot people. I just want to talk on the radio with them. Hence the title of this column.
I was fortunate enough to take two trips in July, once to Rochester, New York, and once to Omaha, Nebraska. Now I just don’t go on a trip without a radio. I had my trusty Kenwood TH-F6 handy talkie with me. It is also my mobile radio when I travel long distances. I had it programmed each trip with all the frequencies I could find in the ARRL Repeater Book. On the way up and back, I thought I would try an experiment. This radio has dual receive. I had one channel on the two meter national calling frequency of 146.520. This way I could hear any nearby hams calling. This radio has a very wide receiver frequency range. I set the second frequency to CB Channel 19. Now, I can just about hear the howls about CB. I understand, but in an emergency one is much more likely to hear what’s going on by listening to CB rather than amateur radio.
The results – NO activity on 146.520, and occasional CB activity. It was just an experiment. The CB channel did make it easier to find out which lane to get into during a traffic jam. Nearly every trucker has a CB rig in the truck. On both trips, I saw only one other ham radio operator.
I had a lot of free time in Rochester. I had programmed every repeater I could find, and hit the jackpot. I spent a day in the hotel monitoring every frequency I could monitor. I had a scanner with me, as well as a multi-band portable. I spent about an hour talking with a local ham about the scene in Rochester. He was a retired engineer who, according to him, built a complete linked repeater system, including controllers. I was talking with him on one repeater and he was on a different repeater. I mentioned to him that I was from the Atlanta area, and he used the Internet Radio Linking Project (irlp.net) to link up with a repeater in downtown Atlanta.
I also checked out the AM radio stations there. My favorite station? WHAM (http://wham1180.iheart.com/), of course!
Traveling with your radio, even with an HT, is not hard. You will need to have at least a magnetic mount antenna that covers the bands your radio has. Of course, it has to be connected to the radio!
You will need to program your radio. It is a good idea to find out what frequencies are in use in your destination. You can program them in manually, but most folks will use a cable and programming software to do the work. Why? It is so much easier to just upload a new program file than to manually change frequencies. You can use the Chirp software to do this. It is available for most radios. I use commercial software from RT Systems (https://www.rtsystemsinc.com/) for most of my radios. When I find out what repeaters and simplex channels are available, I enclose them in a file. I name the file for the destination. For example, I called my Nebraska file “Omaha”. I can either upload the file before I leave or when I arrive at my destination. When I return, I just upload my local frequency file, and I am up and running in no time. Happy traveling with your radio!
We would like to hear from you about your experiences or questions you may have as a new ham. You might have a question that will make a good topic for a future column. Please email me at kj4cmy@gmail.com.
73,
David Harden
KJ4CMY