CatCow’s Computer Dungeon

From the scenic viewpoint coming down Cabbage.

I took this picture with my Samsung camera phone as I was driving westbound on Interstate 30 in Arkansas. I forget the mile marker, I was still a ways out from Texarkana. Traffic was backed up for miles going east. A small car had crossed the median and hit the semi head on. There was nothing left of the car, the biggest piece I saw was a 2 foot long chunk of the rear fender.

I built this to use my Flightcom headset with my FT-817, it will also work with the 857 and 897. The 857 is a little annoying due to the headphone jack being on the back of the radio and the mic jack being under the control head.

Very simple design, I used Cat 5 networking cable to go to the mic jack, and some Radio Shack shielded audio cable for the headphone side. The .206″ mic jack for the headset can be expensive, I got mine at a surplus store a few years ago. There are two switches, one is a momentary pushbutton and the other is a toggle.

These are the relevant pins on the microphone jack from the 817/857/897
Pin 3: +5v
Pin 4: ground
Pin 5: Mic Audio
Pin 6: PTT
Pin 7: PTT Ground
The +5v line powers the microphone element, pins 4 and 5 are the audio being returned to the radio. The two switches go between pins 6 and 7 for PTT.

At the time, I was only interested in doing this as cheap and fast as possible. This was the simplest circuit I could find. The screen capture below is from this site.

Is it just me, or are there faces watching me from the skies?

Pictures taken on I-15 in Idaho and Utah.

I was driving along Willamette near Columbia Park when I saw flames on the side of the road. Stopped to call 911 and got some decent pictures, too

In the picture below, you can see in the background where they did a controlled burn recently to reduce the fire danger.