My friend Sam, KF0ACN has been bugging me about Hugo and static site generators lately, and convinced me to switch back to a static site from Wordpress. He even took the trouble to convert my existing content for me. So anyway, after some touch-ups, here it is, back in markdown rendered to HTML once again. This site has also been an interesting learning experience in some mild CI/CD. The site updates automatically when I commit changes to my git repo which I think is really cool.

It’s been about a year and a half since I last posted about the GS5B. The takeaways from my initial impressions have remained about the same. My GS-5B has gone on a few trips and the Bluetooth programming has been as nice as expected. The radio normally lives in my desk drawer at work. I have a great view to the west from my desk so I have used it to monitor a couple of Skywarn nets. USB charging means I don’t need to have a charging cradle sitting out all the time, I can just plug in to USB when I need to charge.

I was the fourth place winner of Radioddity’s 2020 Black Friday raffle. Proceeds from the raffle are to support the ARRL’s spectrum preservation fund — a worthy cause given the fate of the 9cm band.

When I received the notification I was a winner I got pretty excited. I was hoping to win a GSOC for my G90 (or even another G90) so I felt a little let down that it was “only” another HT to add to the fleet. My first thought was to look for a new ham to pass it along to, but then I looked a little deeper.

It’s been a few years since I wrote a post for the site. Sadly, the blogging software I was using on the old site was a bit of a barrier to frequent posting. Originally I chose PicoCMS for the site due to it’s lightweight nature and markdown syntax. Unfortunately the “Magazine” theme I chose used too much custom HTML and Javascript to make writing in markdown a reality. Each post ended up being written in HTML so at that point why bother with a CMS.

My prior DMR history

First, a quick story so you can get a feel for my DMR experience and know how much salt to take with my review below.

When I lived in Rochester MN, I briefly owned a TYT MD-380. It was a great radio, but it had a couple of downsides (not really the radio’s fault.) First, it was UHF only. This wasn’t a problem when I lived in Rochester. I could access any repeater in town from my living room with any HT and stock antenna. When I moved to Lewiston, my current QTH, I was a few miles out of the Rochester DMR repeater’s range. I work in a metal building, so that limited my usage of the MD-380 to use in the truck for about half of my commute. Most FM activity in Winona–the closest repeaters to my new QTH–is on the 2M band, and the Winona Amateur Radio Club is pretty invested in Yaesu System Fusion on UHF, so I didn’t even bother to program the Winona repeaters in to the MD-380. I just used a different HT. I wasn’t doing much with DMR except for the occasional local ragchew.