April's Ham Log! Ki7QFV
Hello and welcome to my little voyage of Radio Ham discovery. I am a new participant in the wild and wonderful world of Ham Radio communications, and I thought I'd share a little about my journey.
I passed my technician test on 10/1/2017 and acquired a functional little Baofeng UV-5R with an extended whip, a spare battery and a DC car charger. This was my first exploration into VHF/UHF.
The little HT (handitalk) radio allowed me to listen in on several local channels, but it soon became obvious that I couldn't transmit. Why you ask? Because I didn't yet know what offsets and repeaters were really doing. Once I added the appropriate offsets and tone settings, I was able to communicate on the repeater frequencies.
The thing with repeaters is they send and receive on slightly *different* frequencies. And although you can generally listen, unless you program your radio, you won't be able to send. You can look up offsets and the tones/CTCSS online here: https://www.repeaterbook.com/repeaters/Display_SS.php?state_id=53&band=14&loc=%&call=%&use=%. That table can help you configure your radio appropriately, especially if you use the Chirp software application to first back up your radio settings, and then add the channels to your configuration, and finally upload the configuration back to your radio. You can find Chirp here: https://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/wiki/Download
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