Outdoor Adventure USA

As a topic for you to develop, what about the uses of your radio in the back country?

For example, I was in the Green Horne Mountians when we smelled smoke, and saw fire fighting planes overhead. I was able to contact a local repeater (thanks to my mini ARRL repeater book) to find the location of the fire and determine that it was far from our location. We were able to continue our weekend out without fear thanks to the local repeater members.

We also once participated in locating and calling for assistance of a stuck individual who managed to find our (private) linked repeater system and called for help.

You can crossband a dual band radio making an temporary repeater to extend your HT coverage.

What bands and freqs should one monitor when in the outback? What are the emergency contact protocals?

What should you have for a good first radio for your rig? My preferance is a full duplex dual band 50 watt mobile, then followed by a decent HT.

Antenna suggestions?

You can scan with most radios to monitor CHP, business bands, and others, this can be very useful as well as entertaining.

If in an emergency situation, you may have to scan to find someone on simplex, or a repeater. Then you need to know how to decode the PL, and should understand offsets.

There are linked repeater systems that cover several states, talking to home may not be that hard......, plus there is always IRLP and EchoLink.

Well, this could be broken up into 2 nets fairly easily.

I was listening last week, but didn't really feel the need to check in, you probably had quite a few like me that were there and enjoyed the net.

Perk

I like it.

Perk:

Those are great ideas and we will be discussing many (most) on the 5/15/08 net. Thanks!!

That's great ideas and we will be discussing many.Thanks I really like it.
Fog Light

I was out in Arizona running Crown King mine trail. I downloaded tracks for my gps before we left and saw that the trail was marked on the Topo sim card I had in. We were 20 miles into the 26 mile trail when the tracks ran out. Who ever gave them to me must have turned around here. We kept going and a few miles later I realized that my gps was no recognizing my sim card and I no longer had a road to follow in the GPS. It was getting dark and the trail was getting harder. I called out on a repeater I had been monitoring throughout the day and a friendly Ham took my lat long and told me we were on the wrong trail. With his instructions we backtracked a mile and a half and continued on the right trail into town. Without him we may have had to turn around and drive the whole 20 miles back the way we came in the dark. Now I won't go anyware without a paper map or my Ham radio.

OU812 wrote: Now I won't go anywhere without a paper map or my Ham radio.

Wise choice - one which I think everyone ought to abide by when venturing out on the trail, and especially when it is an area you are not familiar with. Relying on a GPS as your sole means of navigation is never a good idea - a paper map backup, and the ability to read the map, are a smart way to prevent possible disaster in the event of electronics failure.

Paper maps are still my primary. To me, GPS is still just a neat toy that has started to grow on me since finding out about APRS.



I wouldn't mind a repeat of this net topic, sounds like a good one and I'm sure there are new things out now.

Scott:

Great story.

If you have a laptop that you can dedicate to trail use, you can also have all of the maps you will need in a reasonably compact format and when hooked up to your GPS, it can be a very useful navigation tool.

DaveK wrote:Scott:

Great story.

If you have a laptop that you can dedicate to trail use, you can also have all of the maps you will need in a reasonably compact format and when hooked up to your GPS, it can be a very useful navigation tool.

I'm as guilty as anyone when it comes to relying on electronic devices for my navigation...from GPS to laptop...but even the laptop could fail...so nothing is a substitute for paper maps. However, systems that are designed with redundancy are a close second, as the chance of total failure is minute at best. I try to keep data loaded on a stand alone GPS as well as my laptop, so that either can be used on it's own if needed...