It’s always a good day when you receive a new toy. In my case, my new Yaesu FT-857 arrived this afternoon in amongst the chaos being caused by a flaky smoke detector in the apartment building being triggered by the excessive heat and humidity. It’s a multi-mode mobile HF/VHF/UHF transceiver. This will allow me to take full advantage of my amateur radio license that I briefly mentioned a few days ago.

Fortunately, I was able to take advantage of the wiring I had installed when I re-installed my Kenwood mobile radio a couple of weeks ago, so I didn’t have to spend another two hours fishing wires from the battery through the firewall into the passenger compartment.

Currently, I have my mobile VHF/UHF antenna connected to it, but I don’t have the ATAS-120 auto-tuning HF antenna installed, yet. It seems there are two viable options. One is to buy a mount to put it on the roof, either attached to the roof rack or to the rain gutter somehow. The other is to mount it on the back door, either hooked to the bottom edge of the door or to the spare tire, similar to my bike rack. Mounting it on the back door is more preferable because it would probably have enough clearance to avoid hitting things on the ceiling of my parking garage. If I mount it on the roof, it would probably perform better but there would be a hassle everytime I wanted to enter a parking garage. So, I’m going to explore what options are available to mount it on the spare so that when it’s fully retracted it’s go enough clearance.

If you’ve already gone through the process of mounting an ATAS-120 on a GM Tracker (or Suzuki Sidekick), please let me know. 🙂

I was over at my friend Darin’s place Wednesday evening.  We set up his new HF rig in the backyard and tried to see who we could hear and talk to.  I had my first DX QSO with the HF privleges I acquired when they updated the legislation a couple of years ago.  It was with OK4RQ, a ham named Pavel located in the Czech Republic.  Though it was a very short conversation consisting of not much more than exchanging signal reports, it was still very cool.  I’ve had an amateur radio license since 1992, but this is the first time I’ve been able to operate on HF.

Since it sat on a shelf for three or four year, I took my Kenwood TH-78A in to Bytown Marine to have it checked out. It seems that it survived and only needed to have the antenna’s BNC connector tightened. At the same time, I bought a new antenna for it since the rubber resister it came with isn’t a very good antenna. I paid the man and off I went.

I was driving away from a geocache in the west end when I heard something thudding and clattering around on the roof. Stopping to check it out, I found the 2m/70cm dual-band antenna for my mobile radio in two pieces. It seems that the threaded connector on the magnetic base had corroded through. (It had seen the better part of ten Ottawa winters.)� So, back to Bytown Marine I went for yet more anntena-related components. At least, the antenna (the expensive bit) was ok and I just had to replace the magnetic base.