G4CTP's Amateur Radio Hints and Tips

It took me a long time to figure out how to enter and leave VFO mode on the RT3S, because the menu options seem to keep changing! Entering VFO mode is shown in an official video here: https://youtu.be/-q6lOVjAwJs In summary, and starting from "CH Mode", the steps are: Menu > Utilities > Radio Settings > Mode > MR Mode The display should now show frequencies in MHz rather than the channel name. The functionality is unchanged, and you can still access your programmed channels as normal. Notice the small channel number indicator to the right. To get to VFO mode, long press the red key. The indicator to the right changes into a "V". Frequencies can now be entered directly from the keyboard, terminated by the green key. Rotating the channel selector knob now changes the frequencies in channel steps. I haven't worked out how it decides whether to use 12.5 kHz or 25 kHz steps. On mine, the A VFO steps in 25 kHz, and the B VFO steps in 12.5 kHz. Perhaps that...

This is a pretty simple one, but I thought it might be useful to create a Zone containing the 2m and 70cm simplex channels. There aren't enough slots to include the "in between" 12.5 kHz channels, so I have only added the more commonly used 25 kHz channels on both bands. First, create the Channels: I have named them using both the old and the new channel name conventions, i.e.: V40 (S20) - 145.500 MHz V42 (S21) - 145.525 MHz, etc. U280 (SU20) - 433.500 MHz U282 (SU21) - 433.525 MHz, etc. If you need it, a list of channels can be found here:  Simplex_Channel_Frequency.pdf (joomla.com) Note that for the 2m band, the Bandwidth should be set to 12.5 kHz, and for 70cm it should be 25 kHz. Apart from that, the settings are similar: Next, I created a Zone called "FM Simplex", and added each of the channels to it. For convenience, I put 2m channels in bank A, and 70cm channels in bank B. In each case, I put the calling channel in slot 1: Finally, I created a scan group ...

I have decided to change from using QRZ.com to Cloudlog as my primary logging software. The main reason for doing this is so that I own the database on my machine, rather than trusting it to someone else's server. It is installed on a Raspberry Pi - and that is where the database lives. Although this machine isn't on 24 hours/day, it is normally turned on when I'm doing anything related to amateur radio. If I need logging from a remote location (e.g. if I'm operating whilst on holiday), then I can leave the Pi running at home. I followed the installation instructions here:  https://github.com/magicbug/Cloudlog/wiki/Installation  - except that the resulting installation had a problem with php-xml until I changed from PHP 7.3 to PHP 7.4, i.e.: sudo apt-get install php7.4 php7.4-curl php7.4-mysql php7.4-mbstring php7.4-xml php7.4-openssl Why this should be is a mystery... but it worked for me! Next, I set my router's port forwarding so that incoming Port 80 points to ...