What did you do to your truck today?

[Bernie]

Put about 200 miles on it from yesterday afternoon until late tonight, acting as a "rover" (mobile station) is a state-wide ham radio contest. Racked up 2,300+ points in the contest, and made contacts as far away as Brazil and Belgium.

 

[nubuilder]

Put about 200 miles on it from yesterday afternoon until late tonight, acting as a "rover" (mobile station) is a state-wide ham radio contest. Racked up 2,300+ points in the contest, and made contacts as far away as Brazil and Belgium.

Holy cow Bernie! How many watts are you pushing?


Drove it to work. That is all.

 

[Bernie]

Put about 200 miles on it from yesterday afternoon until late tonight, acting as a "rover" (mobile station) is a state-wide ham radio contest. Racked up 2,300+ points in the contest, and made contacts as far away as Brazil and Belgium.

Holy cow Bernie! How many watts are you pushing?


Drove it to work. That is all.

The legal limit for ham stations in the USA is 1,500 watts. I'm only using 100 in the truck, and that depends on the band I'm on. On VHF or UHF I can only do 50 watts from the truck. But, when you consider that the world record for an E-M-E (Earth-Moon-Earth (bouncing a signal off the moon)) is 0.05 watts then 100 is more than adequate.

Now, the house rig, that's got 250 watts, so it's a bit more powerful, but the key to good communications distance is a good antenna setup. Yeah, you can "brute force" it with a huge antenna and 1,500 watts, but where's the fun in that? And throwing out that much power just makes it more difficult for everyone else.

(And I did make a really nice contact on St. Patty's Day with a station in Ireland)


Now, the contact I really wanted to make this weekend was a station I was trying to reach in Moldova (on the Russian border) but we just couldn't get a clear enough signal between us. We were able to contact, but not enough to exchange call signs and the other info needed to log it as an official contact.

 

[dirtyoldman]

Played in the mud with it

 

[PenguinLTZ]

Put on 646 miles.

I'm tired.

 

[OPGMC]

Towed the boat home with it, finally redid the wiring, what a pain in the ass that was.

 

[700 sportsman]

Drove it, and used the air horn and PA a couple times

 

[mr_bots]

Drove it down the street to pick up some grub (my night to cook )

 

[agjake11]

over the past few days i washed it and waxed it and swapped consoles and now have a grey one. plus driving to houston and back and the rodeo

 

[OldCracker29]

It's being used as a taxi today.