E1510: Seriously Dumb Question about Ham Radio

you're welcome to ask it on this channel. Join us on discord Hamdradio two dot com forward slash Discord for any and all hand radio questions. We're going to read this one and I want to know what you guys think about it. Check this out. So this is the the article right here, written by our region fifty eight oh four. Okay, he says, I've had my ticket for quite some time, and I like, I still feel like I know nothing about Ham radio. I have all the equipment,

dabble with HF. I spend some time listening to and Raghewing on two meters seventy centimeter, but over the years I have never really gotten into it like I was hoping. I don't know why, I foolishly always feel judged when I'm keying up and trying to start a conversation. I know that's on me now. That's a very real thing. Mike Fright is a very real thing. And being a ham radio operator for thirty years myself, I still feel

that sometimes. I still feel that sometimes if I'm driving around in a new area, if I find a new repeater, or if I find it more likely if I find a repeater or a simplex frequency where a conversation is already going and there might be a pause or break in there somewhere, and I might feel like joining in the conversation. Sometimes I get Mike fright. But we need to get over that. Me, you, we all need to get over that. I've issued my twenty twenty five repeater challenge.

Key up your repeater once a day, make a log, send it to me at the end of the month. Somebody's gonna win a new mobile radio at the end of at least the first three or four months of the year. More importantly, I have a question, he says. Okay, again, I don't really think your question is silly at all. I think this is a very good question. When you are driving around and in an area you don't know, sort of looking up repeaters on your phone and then

programming the radio in accordingly. Why are the radios not smart enough to find local repeaters, figure out the input and output frequency and the CTCSS tone. Why can't you key a frequency and if there's a repeater, it can't discover the correct settings and just work. I always end up filling my memory slots with dozens of repeaters I will never hit across all the states that I travel. Most of the time those repeaters are either offline or

the info is outdated and wrong. Seems like there should be a way to just go key and go am I being just being an idiot because this magic already exists or I just never explored my radio enough to know. Well. Two thoughts on that number one that really kind of does exist. The problem is the info you're getting is not kept up very well. So there's two ways to look at this. Number One. You can load repeater databases into Icon radios, and I believe you can do it

in Yazoo radios as well. Admittedly, I've never actually played around with that very much. It's something I should do if you guys think that is a good video for me to demonstrate a repeater database loading looking up the call when you're traveling, because you can add a GPS dongle to the icon mighty fifty one hundred, which is what I have in the truck, and I believe you can add it to some of the Yazu models FtM

five hundred and two, I think. But then the GPS tells your radio where you are, and it says, okay, everything within a twenty five or a fifty mile radius, here's all your repeater lists. You load it onto an SD card from your computer, put it in your radio. Your radio has that in memory now, and it just follows the GPS signal and it can do that. The problem is that a lot of those repeaters that you're downloading on the SD card, the information is not up

kept by the repeater owner. It's all up to the repeater owner to update the information. Some of it's done by aborl some of it's done by hand radio clubs if it's a club owned repeater, but a lot of it's done by the individual repeater owner, and a lot of it is not updated. So it's a it's kind of a catch twenty two. You can load all this information in your radio. Is it up kept very well? Maybe maybe not. A lot of radios will do CTCSS tone searches. You can go into a certain menu and

can search the tone. Now, there has to be activity coming back to you for the radio to hear, but you can click on a button in the menu and it'll say search tone and it will find that CTCSS tone that that repeater needs. There's also, especially on two meters because two meters so narrow banded, there's also a list of most commonly used frequencies throughout the nation. Like you can get probably twenty or thirty maybe not that many, ten to twenty frequencies on the two meter band that

are used everywhere. Because you got to remember, if you have a repeater on let's say my local two meter repeater here is one forty seven one hundred megahertz. Now put a comment blow if you have a repeater near you that's on that same frequency. That repeater near me, which is a hearst Amateur Radio Club W five HRC is the call sign on it. That repeater here will reach twenty thirty maybe forty miles on a good day.

If we've got some VHF ducting, it might reach one hundred miles, okay, But normally speaking it covers the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex and not much further. So people in Oklahoma City aren't going to hear it. People in Texarcana aren't gonna hear it. People down in Austin, Houston, San Antonio, you're not going to hear it. So there's other repeaters on that same frequency in other areas, and they're all

twenty thirty, forty, fifty miles reaching. Some of them that are on higher towers reach up a lot taller than that. If you have a mountain range in your area, then you're going to reach out a lot farther than that. So it really depends on how far the repeater can reach, how far up it is. You have to submit all

that information when you register. Yeah, when you register repeater with whatever registration service, you use height of the antenna output power EARP effective something radiation power, which is basically the dB gain of your antenna multiplied by the output of the repeater fifty watts, hundred wats, whatever it is.

My point is that frequency can be used over and over again throughout the United States, and there's a list of repeater frequencies that are commonly used, and it wouldn't be a terrible idea to put those frequencies into your radio. Maybe I will compile a list and try to put something like that together for you guys. So, once again, I don't think that's a dumb question at all. I

think that's a very good question. And this first comment here, forget about repeater listings in programming, you are right, is mostly a complete waste of time. What I do when visiting a new area is put out an interesting call on one forty six five to two simplex and try to scare up a local or two. Then I ask what the most used repeater in the areas when local net time and when local net times are, and then

I program that data by hand if needed. In most urban areas there are often a small hindfluo stations monitoring the call frequency. I would like to believe that's true. I have trouble believing that's true, but I think it's becoming more true if we go down through this, and I'll put a link to this in the description below.

All of this and these people are a lot of people are talking about calling monitoring one forty six five two, which is a national simplex calling frequency for two meter simplex two meter FM simplex, and a lot of these comments are about the calling frequency. But let me tell

you something. So I initiated my twenty twenty five repeater challenge to you, and what we really didn't talk about during that repeater challenge is the repeater challenge in a nutshell, is to key up your local repeater once a day, make a log of it, send me the log at the end of the month, and I'm gonna pick a winner, and you're gonna win a brand new mobile radio, dual

band mobile radio. This is for local comms. This is for when you're in your home area you have a home local repeater, trying to get more activity in the home local repeater. On top of that, what we all should be doing, all of us, all of us should be doing this, especially on road trips. If you are on a road trip, you should be monitoring one forty six five to two and you should be periodically calling out throwing at your call sign on one forty six five to two on a regular basis. I do this

I monitor one forty six five to two. I don't throw out my call sign as often as I do. My personal goal for twenty twenty five is to start doing that more. But there's been two or three times where I've been testing radios in this shack over the last two or three months over here, and I was doing a test on one forty six five two, and I had people come, and I'm like, wow, there's people actually listing. Throw out your call sign sometimes and see

what kind of information you could drum up. Throw out your call sign sometimes on one forty six top five to two, and see what kind of information you can stir up. This comment right here is a perfect example what I was talking about. It doesn't quite do what you're looking, what you're asking. But with the icon ID fifty one hundred, which again is what I is my main radio in my truck right now, I can load up a bunch of repeaters ahead of time with their coordinates.

Then I'll use the GPS to tell me the closest ones. Still have to load them ahead of time. There isn't a utility for that, so I'll just save off a few different ones if I need to. Just got the radio on Friday. I haven't played with this because I don't have an SD card reader, but this was a big thing that pushed me towards this radio, and a commenter replied says, I believe the ID fifty two can

do this. Also, yes it can. Blue Cat does something similar for the IC seven thousand and seventy one hundred. Several Yazoos also, Yes, ID fifty one which does that. That feature was the thing that pushed me toard this rado just got my SD card working. It was super easy to add fifteen hundred of my closest repeaters, scan near looks like my GPS, and scans all the repeaters within one hundred miles. It was easy and I couldn't be happier with the purchase. Okay, so the Icon mighty

fifty one hundred will do this. I think there's a way to do it on the Yazoo. Also, I'm gonna have to look that up. Admittedly I don't I don't have a lot of experience with doing that. Let me know if that's something you guys would like to see. Do you want to see a video on that. I'll go learn it because I've told you several times that I learned more than you do because I could go learn something before I make a video about it, which is cool. Is totally cool. First, let me tell you

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Check out the link in the description blow and if you end up ordering from them, be sure to tell them that ham Radio two point zero sent you this right here was probably my most favorite comment. Yeah, and I don't want to call anyone out, but I'm not calling you out. This commentary is okay, get your general It opens up the entire world. No repeaters or other infrastructure necessary. Okay, he's not wrong. This comment was the one that I like. Man, this is like the worst

answer ever. Is there a technical reason why this thing on VHF can't happen? Simply get HF Radio and upgrade your license. Why is this subreddit obsessed with you brought the wrong car? Answers to why is my car doing this? I completely agree with that getting your upgrade to general and extra is an excellent idea, but we need to be more receptive to people's questions with vhf UHF Again, I'm doing this twenty twenty five repeater challenge. I want us to use our repeaters more. We've got a ton

of repeaters out there. Guys, there's a ton of repeaters out there. I get comments all the time about how they don't get used. So let's start using our repeaters. Let's make a list of useful repeaters. People that are driving around in new areas, Okay, if there's activity on your repeater, maybe there's a it's gonna scan through the two meter band or the full forty band and they'll pick you up and start talking to you. And then all of a sudden, you've got more activity on your repeater.

But it's up to you and I the local HAM radio operators in that area to use our repeaters. We need to use our repeaters more. We need to use our repeaters more. Key up your repeater every day. Pick a repeater, Pick four repeaters if you want to say, well there's four near me. Good key all those up every once a day, or at least pick one to key up every day and the other three key up at least once a week. Key up your repeater throughout your call sign, and see what kind of conversations you

can get into. The long and short of it is that there are radios that will do this sort of kind of like you're talking, but not really. You have to load the database into the radio like the icon does, and you download it from a dstar info dot net I think is the website, and it loads the d Star repeaters onto your SD card, but it loads up all the analog stuff too, So it downloads a database, loads it onto an SD card, You put it the st card in the radio, and then the radio will

tell you what's near you. Okay, So you do have to add a GPS dongle to the ID fifty one hundred because it doesn't come with it by factory default. I'm not sure if you can Bluetooth D or not. I'm not sure. I'ma have to research that. There's a lot of stuff the ID fifty one hundred does that I've never even touched on. Okay, I got several repeaters programmed in my own radio, but it will totally do this.

You can load databases in there are the databases maintained sometimes yes, sometimes no. I think the answer of monitoring one forty six five two and asking local hams what the repeaters are in that situation, I think that's a great idea. I think that's a great idea. If you're in the North Texas area or in the Galveston area, I can tell you what are some really really good repeaters in those areas. You guys, have a repeater in your area that is a good repeater, whether it's used

or not. Quote a comment below, let me know what the repeater is, what the frequency is, if you think it's one that should be. If you're thinking this repeater is an excellent it's got great coverage, it sounds really good, well maintained, but nobody ever uses it. Put a location and a frequency and a pl tone in the description. Blow we'll see if we can get something a little bit more going on that. So thanks for watching today.

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