I have to say using the D700 for this is overkill -- the D700 is a great analog radio, particularly for people into APRS. But, it had been supplanted in my car by a D-Star radio and it was gathering dust. Now it runs every day doing RF duty for my Hotspot at home.
The fan in my D700 was beginning to be noisy, so I went to the local electronics store (Frys) and got a US $6 PC CPU fan of the same exact size. It moves just a bit more air. So while I normally run my D700 at 5 watts, and it doesn't even get warm during Connie's Sunday night 2 hour Ozark Net, I will sometimes push it to "medium" power of about 10 watts and it looks like it could run there continuously also. I would not run it at full power for any length of time, though. Some of these D-Star nets go on and on.... Jim - K6JM ----- Original Message ----- From: Tim Hardy AF1G To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2010 7:22 PM Subject: RE: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Easy way to set up a D-Star Hotspot I happen to own two D-700s.. Here we go! Tim, AF1G From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of J. Moen Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2010 9:47 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Easy way to set up a D-Star Hotspot I put up a D-Star Hotspot with a Kenwood D700 that had been sitting in the closet. and an older laptop. My out of pocket expenses were about US $130 if I recall. I wired up a cable and using a second radio, I experiemented with full duplex or repeater mode. It worked. To make it into a real repeater, I would only have to do the things anyone creating a real analog FM repeater would need to do in terms of location, antenna, duplexer, etc. I documented the steps in setting up the Hotspot at http://www.k6jm.com/hs-setup.htm It's pretty easy. Any analog radio that gives access to the discriminator, which includes radios with a Data port supporting 9600 baud, will likely work. Jim - K6JM
