13cm Simplex

Fresh of great weekend at the RSGBConvention my good friend hibby was talking about doing point to point line of sight lines with 400MHz and up. He is super eager to do giant 50Km links and was suggesting hills to climb at the weekend.

I thought maybe we could try something a little easier to debug when it doesn't work. We settled to try point to point between my house and something the other side of the valley.

We did some local test and I was able to hear clear audio out to about 500m. At that distance we ran out of road to walk down. I can see the Newhills Parish Church from a rear window of my house, it is probably a little under a mile away line of sight.

While Hibby headed out there and I set up the yagi, we used 70cm as a return channel as the portapack can't transmit with the current firmware.

We ended up using the rad1o badge from cccamp last year as a 2.4GHz transmitter and a wifi yagi I had lying around. We played with settings for a while and eventually figured out the right combination of settings to do WFM voice!

Next we need to find a pair of points with los that are far enough apart to test range.