What use is an F-call?

You purchased a shiny new radio and it's all you imagined and it works great and you're over the moon with your purchase and you're raring to go, but you find yourself constantly typing in the frequencies, or twiddling the VFO to change repeaters.

As a last ditch attempt, you've got out the manual and you're busily typing in each repeater, one at a time, and then when you've finally done it, you hit the wrong button and you have start again. Only 22 repeaters more to go.

Does this sound familiar?

If it doesn't then we should talk. You really should be programming in all your local repeaters, and better still, all the national ones as well. I know that some radios don't have enough channels for all of that, but I must confess that this limitation is becoming less and less.

So, if you should do all that and you really don't want to manually do all of that work, how do you actually get all the frequencies into your gear without going insane?

You could clone a radio from a friend. They'll need to have the same radio as you do and the radio will need to support a clone mode, but in essence, you make a copy of the settings of their radio into yours. This does require a cable, a friend and two of the same radio, and it requires that they have programmed their radio.

That's a lot of requirements.

Friends are hard to come by at times, and lazy ones are often close at hand, so likely you'll be the one supplying your frequency list to them, rather than the other way around.

Instead of all that, I'd like to point you at a piece of brilliant open source software that runs on Linux, OS X and Windows and has a pretty good chance of being able to program your radio. It's called CHIRP. The list of radios is extensive and increases regularly.

You'll still need a programming cable, which will start a whole discussion about which one. It will also head you down the slippery dip of cheap knock-off cables with fraudulent driver chips, so beware when you start hunting for the cable for your radio.

Get cracking, no excuse to have your radio sit on one repeater for the rest of its life.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB