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Thread: Kenwood TM-431A... some assistance, please?

  1. #11
    plenty of extra room "down his pants"
    ElevenBravo's Avatar
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    No sweat Kes, if the radio is good all the other stuff is nickle and dime... Not terribly unheard of for used gear. I bought my TenTech HF rig the same, no manual... no power cord... no mic. Have no regrets.

    EB
    "Takes .357 to the field... every time..."
    "AR - America's Rifle"
    "Bushido, an honourable way of life"

  2. #12
    may be in trouble


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    Quote Originally Posted by ElevenBravo View Post
    No sweat Kes, if the radio is good all the other stuff is nickle and dime... Not terribly unheard of for used gear. I bought my TenTech HF rig the same, no manual... no power cord... no mic. Have no regrets.

    EB
    HF is moot for me aside from the sliver of 10m SSB that Techs get... and I am too damned old and slow to be smashing keys, and missing that section of my hearing to be chasing dits and dahs. You guys with the General licenses and up pretty much own everything from 10m up to 160m if I have this ARRL chart broken out properly... as well, as I have not found ANY transceivers in the 7000-7500 KHz band, although still looking at least for the rcvr side. I think I am a whole lot of study, or a SHTF event of national proportion, away from the xmtr side of that band. The study will, of course, come with time. So too will the SHTF event, or else we are all on here wasting time, effort, manpower and materials. Ideally the one will take place before the other.

    "Kenny", once in-house and properly fed, won't suffer from disuse in the lack of a mike. I'll be scanning about, see what I can find.

    One major thing about Ham prep that bothers me greatly is this excess reliance on repeaters. Repeaters that may or may not be present in the above national event. The HT's then become very good local radios and not much else.

    Yes, very much cart before horse...

  3. #13
    I'll most likely shit myself



    bacpacker's Avatar
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    You are dead on about a high reliability on repeaters. When I was running our group, at least a portion of all our drills were held without using repeaters, including digital comms. We also would periodically run our weekly net simplex along with some others on repeaters to relay folks who couldn't make it direct.
    Last edited by bacpacker; 09-11-2015 at 12:09 AM.

  4. #14
    plenty of extra room "down his pants"
    ElevenBravo's Avatar
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    No more key smashing...

    No Code General is what is issued today, Extra still requires code.

    A General operator can work 95% of HF frequencies, thus why I never plan to upgrade to Extra.


    STUDY FOR THE GENERAL, JUST LIKE YOU DID FOR TECHNICIAN, AND GET ON HF!!

    the *REAL* fun is HF, trust me!!

    EB
    "Takes .357 to the field... every time..."
    "AR - America's Rifle"
    "Bushido, an honourable way of life"

  5. #15
    I'll most likely shit myself



    bacpacker's Avatar
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    Eb is right CW is no longer required. However there are lots of folks who do very little other than CW. In bad atmospheric conditions nothing works better and more reliable.
    I passed code at 5 words per minute, which at the time was the minimum. I have never used it since and other than the odd letter or three I couldn't copy at all. Sad to say.

  6. #16
    plenty of extra room "down his pants"
    ElevenBravo's Avatar
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    I pretty much suck at decoding CW so I use software to help... but thats what I work the most... Morse Code. Its a thrill!!

    EB
    "Takes .357 to the field... every time..."
    "AR - America's Rifle"
    "Bushido, an honourable way of life"

  7. #17
    Do you have a robot?
    realist's Avatar
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    EB is there really that much difference? I guess I will have to look into it. I am just looking at starting to buy some gear to get started.

    Regarding repeaters. The thing I do not like about them is they sound so convenient I would imagine it would be easy to become dependent on them. We have been having a lot of wild fires out here. I just read a story about one ham group who lost two of their repeaters to fire. So since they are normally out in the boonies and all by themselves I see them being gone in a SHTF situation.
    If it is predictable then it is preventable....... Gordon Graham

    So if it is predictable and preventable then you better prepare.

  8. #18
    I'll most likely shit myself



    bacpacker's Avatar
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    We have a lot of repeaters around here and it is easy to depend on them. Most are in remote areas and when they go down now it usually takes a few days for them to get back up.
    Be sure you know how Simplex works in your AO. Like everything else practice now before you have to function with it.

  9. #19
    may be in trouble


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    Quote Originally Posted by realist View Post
    EB is there really that much difference? I guess I will have to look into it. I am just looking at starting to buy some gear to get started.

    Regarding repeaters. The thing I do not like about them is they sound so convenient I would imagine it would be easy to become dependent on them. We have been having a lot of wild fires out here. I just read a story about one ham group who lost two of their repeaters to fire. So since they are normally out in the boonies and all by themselves I see them being gone in a SHTF situation.


    I think the repeaters, post SHTF, will be those few preppers that have the equipment on hand and the ability to defend it. Wouldn't surprise me a inch if some of the more savvy groups of post SHTF jackals have receivers with DF capability and use that to home in on those few. The notion being that "if they have working radios, they have power, and probably a lot of other stuff" and therefore a target.

    Any remote standalone repeater with a big enough battery pack to run off-grid (with an attached windmill/solar panel lash-up), barring catastrophic damage, will continue to function until someone either smashes it up for the parts or flat out captures the thing whole. Said repeater would have to be fairly remotely located, so far out that the said jackals would have to go a long way to get at it.


    Kesephist

  10. #20
    I'll most likely shit myself



    bacpacker's Avatar
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    UHF/VHF Repeaters can be set up using a simple dual band radio both as a fixed radio or in a mobile.

    DF'ing can be done with a HT. It is really pretty easy. We used to practice that from time to time, mainly looking for people trying to jam our repeaters. We found more than one. It's a good skill to have and well worth learning it. That gives the knowledge to figure out at least to some degree how to get around it. The best one, which is also good ham practice and saves battery life.

    Run as low of a power setting as possible.

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