Long distance contact

Today I went hiking with my wife around chain lakes in Yosemite. It was a tough hike, but once we had a nice dinner at 9,500ft I turned on my radio to see what we could hear. After some scanning I picked up some folks having a QSO in Monterey (150 miles away!). After they were done I called CQ and had a nice conversation with them. Sadly I didn't write down their call signs, or manage to work out how my signal was getting to them, My guess is that I was Loma Pioneer Repeater Club since I was on 442.900 + PL162.2 that matches their repeater network. It was very reassuring to know that even out there we could contact people if we had any kind of emergency.

My First Contact KG6VMX

Tonight I attended my first ever local ham club meeting (LPARC). It wasn't where they said it would be! I got off the highway behind a car with a vanity plate that looked like a call sign and had extra antennas on the top so I figured I was going in the right direction. However this car pulled over in to the school and not the fire station where the meeting was. So I drove another few miles to the fire station, only to find a nice note telling me the meeting was at the school! Oh well, it was a nice meeting and I got to show my radio to folks and ask why I couldn't hit the repeater. Seems I had everything set up, the positive offset and the tone frequency, what I had neglected to do was actually turn on the repeater tone!

With this new found knowledge and my repeater tone turned on I got home and called CQ and someone answered! My first ever ham radio contact was with Bill (KG6VMX) who it just so happened had been at the meeting that evening.

I added it to my QSO Map.

My First Radio

My First Ham radio arrived today!

After consulting with my Uncle G4HON, I was advised that ICOM HT's are the bees knees so I ordered this as soon as I got back from vacation. I found the best price online at GigaParts, it was about $280 shipped, far more than the original budget of around $100 for a police scanner!

Now I need to wait for it to charge and to read the manual a lot and work out how to use the darn thing.

I already found a list of local repeaters so I can program those into the memory settings.