HAM Radio Setup for Beginners

I’ve had several people ask me about what would make up a good HAM radio setup for a beginner. There are a few things to keep in mind when someone is considering a new setup. Please note, this discussion is for VHF/UHF radios only. I may do a similar post for HF at some point.

Set realistic expectations

First, keep in mind that technology has it’s limits. It’s unlikely using a handheld radio and a stock antenna, for instance, you will be able to talk across the state without using repeaters and other services offered by HAM radio clubs you may need to join. VHF and UHF are limited by line of sight. That is why tall towers exist, because the further you can “see” the further the radio signals go. It’s important to understand what the technology can and cannot do, and I hope to explain that below.

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Honeypot Results

The results are in!  After one month  I saw 214,442 malicious login attempts to the honeypot:

Telnet made up almost half of these connections, with 99,840.  Followed by SSH (60,964 connections) and VNC with  52,942 connections.  We only saw about 600 HTTP/HTTPS connections, 20 FTP connections, and 10 SOCKS5 connections.

Some interesting statistics were able to be developed based on this.  Keep in mind, the device  never sent a single unsolicited packet outbound.  All of this traffic was scanning for the device.

Also, you can download the full list of username and passwords or the list of attack source IPs to see every password I saw or everyone who tried to attack.

Check this list, if any of your passwords are on it, change them!!

GD-77 Iowa DMR Codeplug

Hello everyone, here is an updated GD-77 codeplug that covers the entire state of Iowa.

LAST UPDATED SEPT 23, 2018

—–>  Download Iowa DMR GD-77 v2018-09-23 <—–

Please keep these oddities in mind when using:

The GD-77 requires the current talkgroup ID to be present in the RX group, even for the channel you are currently tuned to.  This behavior is different than the MD380 which will always play audio for the talkgroup programmed in the current channel.  To avoid having to create dozens of rx groups, my codeplug is configured with the following groups: Continue reading