Phone on the 900MHz Band
Sunday, April 12th, 2009
I’ve been putting together plans to get G-NET2 working — a wireless data link between my house and my friend’s house 6-7 miles away. I tried a few different antenna designs to work with WaveLAN cards and no luck yet! Each antenna design was a learning experience — after making each antenna, I’d review what I did wrong and try to make a better antenna. Now I think I’ve come up with a good antenna design but to test it, I decided to use a phone (voice) mode instead of data. If I test the antenna with two 900MHz radios, I can at least hear Doug on the other end and see if he’s coming in strong… or not at all.
I did some research on (of course) cheap 900MHz radios. Now that I’ve had my ham license for a year, I’ve learned lots of good stuff about radios and antennas. I learned that a cheap way to get on 900MHz phone is to convert a commercial 900MHz radio. Most commercial 900MHz radios transmit over 1 Watt, the unlicensed limit. Since I have my ham license, that is not a problem! I settled on the E.F. Johnson 86xx series mobile radio. Here’s what I did…
