This post is divided into two parts: Things I’ve done recently, and things I’ve acquired recently.
Events
Last Sunday I was up at 6am to do communications for the MS walk in Worcester. I didn’t actually need to do anything.
This Sunday I was up at 5am to get to the MIT Swapfest. Usually Ken and I come back with both more money and more devices. However, this trip was in the interest of emptying the apartment for the summer. As such, I bought nothing, came back with $310 more, and got rid of about 30 cubic feet of computers and routing equipment. I spent most of the money on a new radio, but that’s beside the point…
Monday (yesterday) I was up at 4am to do radio for the Boston Marathon. I was an operator for the medical teams. It wasn’t really the most exciting thing I’ve ever done, but it certainly got me out of the house. It was the biggest event I’ve ever done, but it was also the most organized so it wasn’t that bad.
Tuesdsay (today) I had an interview at Applied Communications in Northborough. They aren’t quite the same as many of the other companies to which I applied or from which I got offers, but it sounds like they have the opportunity for me to travel a good bit and work on some very different projects. They seem to like me a lot. If they can come through with an offer close to some of the others, I’d likely nab the job.
Additions
I’ve got a few small things recently, but the two large additions to the RF section of the apartment are as follows:
An HP 8924C service monitor. This handy device has an RF generator and analyzer, as well as a spectrum and network analyzer. In addition to the analog functions, it does all sorts of encoding models such as CDMA, GSM, EDACS, etc. The reason I could get it for $hundreds not $thousands is it’s title: Cellular Monitor. It was produced for cell phone techs to trouble shoot phones (back when this was done rather than just throwing them away). As such, hardly anyone on eBay found it, and I nabbed a sweet device. Here’s a pic of the analyzer sweeping a duplexer:
A Yaesu FT-8100R mobile radio. This is a dual band (2m/70cm) ham radio that has two features I needed: cross band repeating and wide band receive to 1.3ghz. In general I stay away from ham equipment (versus commercial) since it tends to be much lower quality (ham equipment doesn’t need to pass FCC specs - it’s up to the operator). This is in fact the case with this radio: the deviation is a little high (gets to 6khz), it’s moderatly deaf (opens at -120dBm as opposed to my Motorola’s -158 dBm) and the output frequency is a bit off (1.3khz on VHF and 700hz on UHF, compared to 200hz on my motorola). Regardless, it does several functions on different bands plus wide band receive, which isn’t something commercial equipment is made for. It has a different purpose, and if I need higher performance for a task I’ll just use a Motorola.