Category: UHF/VHF

  • Yaesu FTM-500D Review: A Compact Fusion Mobile

    Part of our Where to Spend Your Money guide. The FTM-500D fills a genuinely useful niche in Yaesu’s mobile lineup: a compact Fusion-capable mobile with a fully detachable head, small enough to work in vehicles where dash space is tight. Detachable Head Design The separated head and body let you mount the display wherever it…

  • How to Read a Repeater Directory Listing (RepeaterBook, TravelPlus)

    A repeater directory entry is dense with abbreviations. Here is what each field actually tells you.

  • What Is a MARS/CAP Mod? How It Works and the Legal Reality

    What a MARS/CAP mod actually does, who’s legally allowed to use it, and how to unlock extended transmit range on the Icom IC-2730A, AnyTone AT-D878UV II Plus, and AT-D578UV III Plus.

  • 1946: The 2 Meter Band Opens and VHF Takes Off

    Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series. The HF bands reopened in late 1945, but the bigger long-term shift for amateur radio happened just after, when the FCC reshuffled the VHF spectrum and handed hams the band that would eventually become the backbone of local and regional communication: 2 meters. A new…

  • 1950s-70s: 70cm Opens and Repeaters Change Local Ham Radio

    Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series. Two meters got amateurs into VHF in 1946, but the real transformation of local ham radio took another three decades to arrive, once hams pushed into UHF and figured out what to do with repeaters. This period covers a lot of ground, from new band…

  • When the Repeater Goes Silent: Your Backup Plan for Grid-Down Comms

    Part of our Emergency Communications and Preparedness guide. Repeaters are one of the best parts of this hobby. Stick a repeater on a tower or a mountain and suddenly two handhelds that couldn’t hear each other across town can talk clearly across a whole metro area. Under normal conditions, this is exactly what GMRS and…

  • Setting Up APRS on the AnyTone AT-D578UV III Plus

    The 578 shares its APRS architecture with the 878, which makes sense since AnyTone builds the CPS around the same feature set across the mobile and handheld lines. The setup steps are nearly identical, but a mobile radio adds a couple of wrinkles worth calling out, starting with the GPS antenna itself. Mount the GPS…

  • Ground Plane Verticals for 2m and 70cm: A Simple Build

    A quarter-wave ground plane vertical is the simplest antenna you can build for VHF and UHF, just one radiating element and a set of radials off a connector. Here is how to put one together.

  • 2 Meters: The Workhorse VHF Band

    2 meters does not get the DX glamour of the HF bands, but it is the band doing the most day-to-day work in this hobby: repeaters, nets, APRS, satellites, and simplex, all at once.

  • What Is a PL Tone / CTCSS Tone?

    If you have ever programmed a repeater and gotten silence, a missing PL tone is often the culprit. Here is what CTCSS tones are and how they work.

  • Configuring APRS on the AnyTone AT-D878UV II Plus

    The 878 will do APRS, both analog and DMR-APRS through the GPS revert channel, but it is not a one-button affair like the Kenwood. Almost everything worth setting has to happen in the CPS software first, then you fine tune on the radio itself. Here is the setup I actually use. Enable APRS and GPS…

  • The AnyTone AT-D578UV III Plus: Why I Own Three of Them

    One radio in the Jeep, one in the manpack, one in the shack. Here’s why the AT-D578UV III Plus earned three spots in my setup instead of one.

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