Radio Free Meredith

Whilst doing a little late-night unpacking, I happened across my poor neglected Yaesu VX-5R handheld triband radio. Its power adapter disappeared a while back, and likely wouldn't have worked on 220V anyway, but as it just so happens, I have a European universal power supply which (a) supports the correct voltage, and (b) has the right kind of tip for the radio!

A little Googling has turned up a list of Belgian repeaters, and after some reconfiguration (the standard European repeater shift is 7.6 MHz, as opposed to the 5 MHz that US repeaters use), I am now listening to the ON0RCL repeater on 438.850 MHz. It's dead quiet apart from the periodic station identification, but that's coming through loud and clear. Maybe things will pick up in the morning.

I need to refresh myself on what the requirements are for using my license internationally, since I don't have a Belgian callsign yet, but the repeater's Echolink number is 377156, if any of y'all use Echolink and are interested.

I am generally happiest when I'm getting interesting things done. I like to be able to point at stuff I've written/coded/cooked/sewed/carpented/soldered/&c. and say "Look, I made this," whether I'm talking to somebody else or just myself. This kind of applies to coursework, but usually not all that much; unless I hit some really cool insight along the way (those who were awake and listening for the Night of Paring an Inductive Condition Down One Aggravating Step At a Time, Then Bribing an Undergrad with Food to Do the Algebra For Me are familiar with this) or it's just a cool project generally (last semester's game-theory project, as strenuous as it was, is a good example here), then it's just grunt-work that I really don't get a lot out of. I have a pretty good sense for what I need to work through in order to get a better understanding of what I'm doing.

( Skip if you hate examples, or if you hate Meredith's long stories )

So, all in all, it was a fun and productive trip. (I also made a small 80m transceiver, but it's not quite finished and I don't have an antenna for it yet, so I haven't tested it and probably won't get around to that until Christmas break.) Dad and I also learned that making PCBs is hard, and that we both like driving around town not really saying much, particularly when my mom and both my sisters are home.

I got back Friday night, and dived straight into helping cryptogeekboy install the used-but-in-new-condition ICOM 2100H that I'd discovered at Houston Amateur Radio Supply and he bought over the phone. This helped to alleviate some of my paranoid fear of installing things in cars, since nobody got electrocuted, probably because we had the good sense to disconnect the battery first. This involved a lot of cutting and soldering on large wires that had previously been in the harness for his old car radio, plus adding a phono plug to the hot and ground wires for one of his car speakers, with the end result being that now he can tune anything on the 2m band in FM, powered by his alternator, with the audio coming right out of the dash. And it worked the first time, which is terribly cool, plus no one was killed, which is even cooler.

Now it's Sunday, and the kitchen is clean, and kato has Debian installed on him because the brokenness of YaST was pissing me off, and you can actually see the floor of the shop now, and I'm going to run over to Lowe's and see if I can't find a pegboard and some brackets to get all the tools off the bench and onto the wall so that we can find them more easily. Oi for making stuff work.