Charity Radio Project

I started on a repeater rebuild project, and I had a few radios donated to me for this project. The donator works for a radio communications company near San Fransisco, and he had a vast supply of old VHF radios that were now unusable on the commercial band. Because they were destined for the dumpster, he gave me a call, and offered a few more radios to go to Hams without one. I began thinking about how I could supply one of these for the next Tech class the club presents, I could complete the repeater build, and the remainder could go to other Hams without the proper equipment.

I started this as a road trip with my newly licensed Mom, KJ6HVB. This would be an all day trip, but considering there was no cost for these, I could justify a road trip. After all, I had fun chatting with my Mom, and playing with radio gear. I was amazed as to how much APRS traffic we observed. We started to recognize callsigns we saw in the morning by the end of the day.

I was really excited to get the repeater built, and see what these radios could do. After running checks on all of the gear, I had 17 working radios, and 2 with a bad receiver. Now programming these would be a challenge, as special hardware is required, but I do look forward to tuning these with my Mom, and putting them to good use.
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KI6PSP (Ed)