Ham Radio Ring Tones - CW ID

Someone somewhere in the past year or so was saying their phone, or they knew someone who did this, had CW ID's for the people in their phone book. Well I just remembered this today and figured I would give it a shot.

I set my radio to CW and used my Sony voice recorder to record my keying. I just did the call signs once, on individual files. Then I edited the files and trimmed them so I had just the CW - the delay before and after was cut off.

My phone is a PPC-6700 PDA so I connected it to the computer with a USB cable to sync the files. I loaded the recordings to the "Rings" folder under Windows. Then I went in to my phone book and edited the people's files by selecting their call sign under the ring tones folder. Pretty cool!

It seems pretty straight forward. However, the volume of the playback on the recorded CW is pretty low. I am not sure what the deal is with that. The volume on the computer was normal when I edited the files. They are MP3's by the way. So I am not sure how to get that back up. Maybe I can boost the volume and then reload the files.

Anyway, my phone will now ring with the call sign in CW for whoever of my ham buddies calls!

Great 2m Opening Last Night

I got a text message from a buddy of mine, Jim KC8JPZ, last night around 10:00pm saying that 2 meters was hot. Unfortunately, I don't have any good antennas up for that band - just a mobile diamond SG-7900A attached to a metal chair in the room. I have a 3 element yagi I made out of PVC and a tape measure for direction finding, but trying to hook that up in the room is more of a challenge than I wanted to mess with.

Apparently, the APRS propagation map was showing a lot of red - the hot zone for tropo - in our area. VHFDX didn't show the MUF because everyone entered their contacts as tropo. Tropospheric ducting is independent of the upper levels of the atmosphere, so there is no way to, say, calculate where an E cloud is like you can in an Es opening on 6m.

Anyway, I tuned to 144.200 just for the heck of it, on my mobile antenna, and I could hear some weak stations in there! I waited a while longer, tuning around, and caught a couple louder stations.

The first guy I worked was Richard WB0NQD in EM29 on SSB. Then I worked KC0CF in EN32 on CW a few minutes later. All this from EN80 on an indoor mobile antenna - vertically polarized to boot!

I really wish I had my beams up. I have a 13B2 for 144 and an M2 440-21ATV for 432. The only time I get to use those these days is when I am roving in a contest or operating in EN39. I can't put up any outside antennas here at the house. If I did have the antennas up, last night would have been spectacular!