k4sip.com

Florida just got too expensive.

Anyway, if you’ve pulled this site up — you’ll see I don’t regularly post here too often.

But thanks for stopping by. Any references to Tampa or Tampa area are old news. I’m up here now, enjoying the cool mountain views, cooler temperatures and cheaper cost(s) of living.

Happy New Year to 2023.

I have not been updating this site that often lately, but then again what’s new there?

Some recent posts on the AllStarLink community page have gotten me interested in building homebrew Allstar nodes again.

I might throw together a page or a video on what I’ve been toying with. Who knows….

(If I posted it here, would anyone even notice it??)

I realized I hadn’t updated the site in like two years, and I’ve moved, changed jobs, and priorities have really shifted in-between those 24+ months, so I went through some of the pages and changed the details around.

But hey, I don’t really update or come here that much anymore, and I’m not on/into social media.

So if you “know” me and you’re really trying to keep in touch with me, give me a call 🙂

If you don’t, well, have a nice day anyway and thanks for stopping by.

June 2019. Nearly a year and half later. Let’s post!

Did some updates to the site tonight, and I hope to be doing this more often for anyone stopping by who’s checking.

Updated WordPress. Updated my AllStar Link page with some node changes. And added some more AllStar live streams to the site too.

But that’s all out of me for now. I just wanted to make sure this still works. 😉

It seems that I’m making about one post a year, so far.

Not exactly stimulating, I’m sure.

Life has had me busy and outside of the hobby of Amateur Radio for the past few months, as family and personal things always seem to be abundant in priority anyway.

I’m still the owner of a 70cm (capable) Motorola Quantar repeater. I’ve asked a friend to help me network it properly into the Allstar system, so that I can perhaps start building a network of radio nodes in the various areas where I’m at. I have mild interest in the P25 networking capabilities of the unit, but I’d really like to get my analog voice Allstar RF node off the ground first.

Interfacing the Quantar into a URI->Raspberry PI configuration seems to be a trivial or somewhat complex thing. But I’m hoping we can figure something out.

I’m already quite used to Allstar operations via VOIP and the PC. Micro nodes seem to be a neat thing to have. RF-wise, I’d like to pop a node into Bradenton (current living situation), and down into Venice. Also one in Lakeland, and up in Mount Dora. I’d also like to get a mobile node up and running in the trunk that uses cellular data to remain on the linked system. All things that will come in good time, I suppose. Along with some time, effort, ability and some money to fund it of course. 😉

Add to the list of todos, oh… along with that General license we still hope to pick up here along the way.

May this not be the last post until a year from now. Fingers crossed…

~Byron

I haven’t posted in a while.  A couple of weeks after I activated this site, my father passed away.  He had just celebrated his 62nd birthday, and was finally considering retirement from his job at the railroad he’d held for 30+ years.  Losing my father without warning really set me back, and I haven’t really been the same in the past 8 months since.

Like other things, amateur radio sure took a backseat in my life as far as priorities.  I’ve been back on the radio more a little lately, but just for short checkins on the nightly nets.  No brief QSOs or anything lengthy.  Work has been much busier, but lately I’ve been trying to find time for personal life, my family, hobbies and that sort of thing.

I have amassed a collection of UHF ham gear over the past couple of years.  Let’s see…a Quantar 70cm repeater, a 70cm duplexer, and a bunch of Kenwood TK mobile and Motorola HT series 70cm radios.  Need to figure out what I want to keep, and what I need to get rid of.

I’d also like to get my General and have that out of the way, so I can dabble in the works of HF.

Hopefully the next few weeks and months bring better times and better days.  Still not quite the same without the old man around.

I thought I liked this one because it was ‘different’.  Then I tried bringing it up on a mobile browser.

I’ll likely be changing themes around, until I find one I can stand the next day.

Honestly, I haven’t had the desire to make a personal web site of any sort in years.

But I’ve taken a liking to amateur radio over the past few years, and finally got my Technician’s license in 2015.

Since then, I’ve stumbled upon a fair amount of repeaters, other hams, and new technologies associated with this hobby.

Seeing as I bought my call sign as a domain name, I figured I’d use this site to let others keep track of what I manage to post.  🙂