WUZombies
Adventurist
In a playful discussion in the Bonfire forum I talk about a whuffo asking what race the 146.52 sticker on the back of my van was from. The sticker started from another idea I had about traveling, while on a trip.
Driving back and forth across Texas for not-camping-trips far too often in the past year I played with programming repeaters along the route using Repeater Book or running simplex on the 2M or 70cm national calling frequency. Outside of two repeaters between me and Oklahoma along I-45/SH-75 I've found very little repeater activity that didn't involve a massively linked repeater network (like Saltgrass or Wins. However I have had quite a bit of luck chatting with random HAMs via simplex.
Those other contacts on simplex weren't other travelers but guys (and gals) at home in their shack running seriously powerful stations with beam antennas. They all did a great job of aiming towards my moving target and tracking as I drove along the highway (the van is a bullet train, if the bullet moved at a walking pace).
While on the 2016 big trip in which my family drove across Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah and New Mexico the only repeaters I could find any activity on were once again the linked repeaters. In those cases I was often talking to someone well away from the region I was in (which is neat). Outside of the mountains simplex QSL proved to be the most reliable method once again, but also once again it was never with another traveler on the highway.
Unsurprisingly while in the Tetons, Yellowstone and Glacier my group moved frequencies a couple of times due to other HAMs running simplex in their groups, which I thought was pretty cool.
As of late I've been playing with an odd-ball setup, monitoring 146.52 on a Baofeng with a temporary magmount while using the mounted Yaesu for normal traffic and repeaters. Mostly because the Yaesu is infinitely easier to tune via the keypad while moving and being more powerful with a better antenna/mount. This very unscientific test is on going and I'm not sure what I'll end up doing by the time the 2017 big trip comes up in the summer, but I wanted to see what others are doing.
So what do you do while traveling, especially when outside of your normal driving area and outside of your typically used repeaters.
(Whuffo is from skydiving and is a term for someone who doesn't jump and doesn't understand why someone would. It comes from "why for you jump outta them planes" which is the #1 question asked, annoyingly so).
My current goofy setup (the CB comes on if there is someone in the group who isn't a HAM or when traffic on the highway starts backing up):
Driving back and forth across Texas for not-camping-trips far too often in the past year I played with programming repeaters along the route using Repeater Book or running simplex on the 2M or 70cm national calling frequency. Outside of two repeaters between me and Oklahoma along I-45/SH-75 I've found very little repeater activity that didn't involve a massively linked repeater network (like Saltgrass or Wins. However I have had quite a bit of luck chatting with random HAMs via simplex.
Those other contacts on simplex weren't other travelers but guys (and gals) at home in their shack running seriously powerful stations with beam antennas. They all did a great job of aiming towards my moving target and tracking as I drove along the highway (the van is a bullet train, if the bullet moved at a walking pace).
While on the 2016 big trip in which my family drove across Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah and New Mexico the only repeaters I could find any activity on were once again the linked repeaters. In those cases I was often talking to someone well away from the region I was in (which is neat). Outside of the mountains simplex QSL proved to be the most reliable method once again, but also once again it was never with another traveler on the highway.
Unsurprisingly while in the Tetons, Yellowstone and Glacier my group moved frequencies a couple of times due to other HAMs running simplex in their groups, which I thought was pretty cool.
As of late I've been playing with an odd-ball setup, monitoring 146.52 on a Baofeng with a temporary magmount while using the mounted Yaesu for normal traffic and repeaters. Mostly because the Yaesu is infinitely easier to tune via the keypad while moving and being more powerful with a better antenna/mount. This very unscientific test is on going and I'm not sure what I'll end up doing by the time the 2017 big trip comes up in the summer, but I wanted to see what others are doing.
So what do you do while traveling, especially when outside of your normal driving area and outside of your typically used repeaters.
(Whuffo is from skydiving and is a term for someone who doesn't jump and doesn't understand why someone would. It comes from "why for you jump outta them planes" which is the #1 question asked, annoyingly so).
My current goofy setup (the CB comes on if there is someone in the group who isn't a HAM or when traffic on the highway starts backing up):
