Category: Equipment and Antennas

The TYT TH-8600 is a compact, inexpensive  25-watt VHF/UHF FM radio made in China. While it gets the job done, it has a number of shortcomings that users of the “name brand” equipment take for granted, such as automatic repeater offsets, alphanumeric channel labels, and the like. But you can’t have everything in a small package that costs around $100. I bought it more because of its form factor than its price – it fits neatly in the accessory tray in the dashboard of my car. I plan to upgrade to a better transceiver soon, but this one has served me well since I bought it at the Dayton Hamvention last year.

Dan KB7JZI, who uses the TH-8600 and has much advice for its users, quips on his club’s website that TYT stands for “take your time” – programming the rig is not a simple task. And the manual isn’t much help either. It’ll give you the information you need, sure, but it requires going through many steps to accomplish anything. I wanted to program a few channels during a road trip last fall, so I patiently took my time, read the manual, and dictated each step into my voice recorder so I could transcribe them and follow them later.

So here, for your benefit and mine, are the steps to program a repeater or simplex channel into the TH-8600. Continue reading “TYT TH-8600 Channel Programming”

As Field Day approaches, we’ll be taking many long pieces of cable – coax, extension cords, network cables, even guy ropes – out into the field and setting them up for our annual not-a-contest emergency exercise. Each year, many hams undoubtedly find that the cables they coiled up after last year’s Field Day are a twisted, tangled mess. Some end up broken, frayed or not working. It’s a frustration, for sure, and much can be avoided if the cables are coiled up the right way.

Unless your cable is on reels (either motorized or hand-crank), you’re probably coiling cables by hand. The most expedient method is often to use your forearm as a makeshift reel, coiling the cable between your palm and your elbow. The problem with this approach Continue reading “Cable coiling the right way”

My first antenna as a Novice in the late sixties was a 40-meter dipole strung up in our back yard between my bedroom window and a surplus Signal Corps wooden pole that my dad bought at Silverstine’s. It was fed with RG-58 cable, soldered to the two wires across a white ceramic insulator. I probably still have the insulator somewhere, though the wire and coax has long since been discarded. It was an adequate performer and it even worked on 15 meters, but I wanted something a little more versatile. I had an 80-meter crystal, after all.

Despite the warnings from the older hams in the club about a vertical being “equally bad in all directions,” I saw an ad for the World Radio Laboratories WVG Mark 2 vertical. Continue reading “World Radio Labs WVG-MK2 Vertical Antenna”

Used and decommissioned Motorola gear is a common sight at swap & shops and ham flea markets.  And hams are always in need of one more 12 volt power supply to run station equipment or accessories.

At the intersection of those two truths is the Motorola HPA3000A power supply. Continue reading “Motorola HPN3000A power supply modification”