Listening Live to Scanners Feeding Online Streams

I have a few scanners feeding online feeds such as LiveATC.net. Some of these allow no way to listen directly to the scanner in my shack without listening to the feed online. To solve this, I bought a Behringer MicroMix MX400 mixer. It has 4 inputs and one output. With audio splitters on the scanners, it was an inexpensive way to allow me to easily listen directly to the scanner audio without disconnecting the online feeds.

Arduino Maxtroller Case

Finally found the time to put together a box for the 2 Arduinos controlling my Motorola Maxtracs for monitoring the local 800 MHz radio system. Here's a couple of photos of the project:

Motorola Maxtrac 5-pin Accessory Jack

My latest hardware project was to add a mono audio jack to the back of my Maxtrac 800 radio.  I have wanted a way to finally be able to record audio from the radios.  I added a couple of crimp pins to the plastic housing and ran wires from Pin 1 (ground) and Pin 4 (external speaker) to a female 1/8" audio jack.  I got the crimp pins from a DB-25 connector kit from Radio Shack. 

Great Utah Shakeout 2012

This Tuesday was the Great Utah Shakeout earthquake drill. I was looking forward to the opportunity to review our family's preparedness at home and then participate in the drills that were to take place in the community. It was fun to have the chance to go to the Davis County EOC and work in the Amateur Radio room. We got to pass mock traffic and interact with the county officials in the mock disaster. Afterwards, the debrief was also informative and reminded me that we always need to look for ways to improve our plans to become prepared for whatever type of disaster that may occur.


The county has a nice radio setup with capabilities on many different modes from CW to packet and band capabilities from HF to UHF.  Area repeater coverage was also excellent with contacts from the North end of the state to the South end.  Seeing how a good station like K7DAV is put together even gave me some ideas for improvements for my own shack.

Aging Satellites

The past week there has been a lot of talk about AO-51 being offline. This has been my favorite satellite to work because it's been very easy. It's kind of sad to see it have issues, and just at a time when I have really gotten interested in working the birds as often as schedule allows.

I guess it's good to know now about the problems before I make a big investment in equipment to work satellites. I hope it can be successfully restored. If not, I hope that it's future replacement is launched sooner rather than later. I suppose I need to realize that traveling that high and fast in space put satellites in an extreme enviorment which makes for shorter rather than longer life expectancies.

HT Stand

I've been wanting to clean up my desk for some time now. I saw Scannermaster sells a stand to put your handhelds on, but the price was more than I was willing to pay.

This week my father in law was kind enough to help me build my own stand and all it cost me was the price of some stain. It's nice to organize the desk and have the HTs where I can see them and read their displays.

Working Satellites

It's been a tough go at getting my first satellite contact. All the books make it sound easy, but it's more of a challenge than I thought. I've tried numerous passes and each time it seems to take me the entire pass to get tuned in and by that time it's too late to make a contact. Here's hoping I can make some contacts sooner rather than later. I seem to be missing out on too much fun otherwise.

Arrow Satellite Antenna

I got my Arrow Satellite Antenna last week. It was super easy to put together. It's lightweight and works great with my HT for amateur satellite work. It comes with both 2m and 70cm elements. I purchased the optional duplexer that fits into the handle, so I can connect it directly to my handheld.

Thanks to the youtube video of K7AGE, I was able to make a bracket to mount the antenna onto a camera tripod. The bracket also has a holder for my radio and a small recorder. Very convenient to have everything all mounted on one tripod.

Here's a link to K7AGE's youtube video on making the mounting bracket.

Arrow antenna bracket