A while back Chris took her car in to our regular shop for routine service, and she asked them to see if they could improve on the not-so-tidy installation job she and I had done on her 2-meter mobile ham radio rig. They did such a fine job that I decided to have them do mine too. Not only did they handle the wiring, but they also took care of the antenna lead and set the radio on a bracket of sorts, which Chris’ rig didn’t need.
The hardest part was making sense of the programming instructions so that I could get into the local repeaters, but once I got that sorted out I was quickly able to program in several more repeaters that I thought might come in handy during my travels.
Now if our HF antenna kit would just get here so we can get the base station rig on the air, we’d finally be in a position to put these licenses to some serious use.
And of course, we have that four-band radio she got for home use on the bands the HF rig won’t do, and it’s supposed to replace a 2-meter handheld that we’ve been using at home, freeing up the latter for field use (it was, in fact, one of the two radios we used to keep in touch while driving our respective vehicles from North Pole, Alaska to our present stomping grounds). The last time we tried to set up the four-bander, though, we apparently got the juice hooked up backwards or something. Fixing that was one of two jobs that Eddie, WB4QAU, did for us—the other being fixing this mobile rig that’s now installed in my Bronco.
No, neither one of us has ever shown much inclination to do any “contesting.“ Mostly, Chris wants to be able to take part in various ARES-related nets, which because of the ranges they cover need to be conducted in the longer-wavelength bands.
