We had a great turnout this week with 9 check-ins to the net. Several Club members have recently purchased new Yaesu digital VHF/UHF radios, so this net is becoming the place to come to learn about this exciting new twist on day to day FM voice communications. Everyone that has experienced using this special digital mode cannot stop raving about the clarity and total lack of noise. Often, when two or more members go off to another frequency to experiment with digital, it is difficult to get them to come back! As we continue to experiment and test we’ll devote a portion of this net to talking about digital FM each week.
During the past couple of nets we have also been talking about operating with JT65. To many, this low power, weak signal mode seems somewhat boring, so we talked about some of the finer points this week. Low power, weak signal operating can really become an art form if one takes the time to explore it deeper than face value. Once you learn basic operation, it is not unusual to hear about operators using incredibly small output wattages in the sub-1W range and making thousand mile contacts.
We also talked about using JTAlert, an add-in product for JT65 that adds a lot of additional functionality and convenience to the two major JT65 applications. JTAlert can be freely downloaded at http://hamapps.com/. If you are a JT65 user, this is a useful addition to your setup. It offers a full macro system, callsign lookups, log book interface, and even allows user to user real time chat.
