WW8TF Winlink Gateway Shutdown

WW8TF has decided to terminate some services in 2024 as part of a general clean-up of unused, inefficient, and underutilized services. Notably, the WW8TF-10 Winlink Gateway on 145.070 MHz in Rittman, OH has been shut down to free up the antenna and equipment for other things.  An area alternative on…

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XLX330 Transcoder Changes

Some changes have been made to the Megalink Reflector XLX330. With decline in local DMR traffic and increase in YSF traffic, it has been decided to terminate the cross-mode linking of DMR BM 311070 into YSF/DMR Room #83603. The default connections have changed. DCS330A/XLX330A is still the preferred D-STAR connection…

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Rittman Watertower Site EOL

For many years, the City of Rittman has graciously hosted an amateur radio repeater on the water tower north of town. It is an excellent location with a good elevation and HAAT. Unfortunately, with the shift to the state-wide radio network of local municipalities, the facilities used by WTF for…

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Building an APRS Two-Way IGate (2023)

Recently WW8TF-15 was upgraded to Debian 12. Since WW8TF-15 runs on a Raspberry Pi, it was also a good time to replace the SD Card. Starting over from scratch gave an opportunity to review and revisit this info for 2023. Here’s how to build an easy two-way APRS IGate with existing or easily obtainable parts.

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Yaesu 8900 with Standard Mic

To use a standard headset mic with the Yaesu 8900 there’s a bit of adapter creation that must be done. Surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of information out there about how to do it. Upon the need to build a new adapter for the in-shack 8900, it shall be documented here.

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Injecting CTCSS with PiTone

As faithful readers of the (very occasional) posts to this site, there is a series on modifying and using the Yaesu DR-1X repeaters. One of the latest hacks that’s been done to one is the use of a D2A board and PiTone to inject the needed CTCSS tone into the…

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