Thomas Does Radio or Something

What with the ARRL June VHF contest coming up this weekend and the weather being warmer than 12"+ of fresh powder experienced in January, I finished buying and putting together the right PVC parts to hold my Elk 2M/440L5 LPDA antenna stably above head height. It's composed of a cheap speaker stand with the speaker post inverted, 6' of 3/4" schedule 40 PVC pipe, a 3/4" to threaded to threaded to 1" fitting pair, and 2' of 1" PVC to fit the stock bracket of the Elk. Rotation is, of course, of the armstrong type. No additional handle required. Assembled stand setup in the apartment stairwell. 6' of RG-58 for scale hanging from the Elk antenna core (no elements mounted). Gets some decent reach!

With an Elk Antennas 2M/440L5 providing me directional operation on 2m and 70cm and a couple handheld rigs that include 1.25m, I wanted more than just a stock whip to operate with those rigs. Since I have access to scraps of copper refrigerant tubing at the day job from test/prototype systems, I thought it'd be a great material to build with. To put it briefly, the results have been fantastic to start. As initially assembled on the terribly scientific test stand of an empty recycle bin.

People have been making UART cloning interfaces for the single-pin serial on TRRS 3.5 mm plug to Yaesu radios like the VX-2 for years. Unfortunately, those years mean that many people were making RS-232 to TTL converters and waxing poetic about using two or more transistors to implement the level shifting between the ±5 V or more interface and 3.3 V for the radio. Heck, some even implemented a whole zener and PNP linear regulator to ensure a safe pull-up voltage was presented to the radio. But wait, we've got chips that go from USB to right where we need the signal levels… (Styled as a recipe blog post; skip to the end for the ingredients and assembly steps after the story)