About

About WX4WCS

I’m Cody, an amateur radio operator in Cherokee County, Georgia. I was first licensed in March 2014 and upgraded to General in June 2015. I serve as Skywarn Coordinator for Cherokee County, and I’m a member of Cherokee County ARES and the Cherokee County Amateur Radio Society (WX4CAR). I’m also a Georgia EMT, so I spend a lot of time thinking about what happens when normal communications stop working.

I learned that firsthand on an off-road trail in 2019, when a routine trip turned into a rollover response and a local repeater was the only link out. Since then, most of my operating has centered on the parts of the hobby that matter when infrastructure fails: APRS, packet message relays, AREDN mesh networking, and weather spotting.

This blog is where I write up what I build and learn: projects like connecting an old weather station to APRS, gear reviews from real use, and operating notes from the field. By day I work in cybersecurity, so expect the occasional overlap between radios and networks.

About the callsign: I started out as KK4ZGZ, which is a mouthful on the air. WX4WCS is easier to say, and the WX is shorthand for weather, which ties back to what got me into radio in the first place. I’m still a video stringer with Live Storms Media, though I haven’t been out in a while.

Affiliations

  • Cherokee County ARES
  • Cherokee County Amateur Radio Society (WX4CAR)
  • AMSAT, member #41010
  • SouthCARS, #11190

The Station

HF

  • Icom IC-7300: SSB, FT8, JS8Call, VARA HF (Winlink, VarAC)
  • Inverted-V dipole with an LDG IT-100 tuner

VHF/UHF and digital voice

  • Anytone AT-D578UVIII Plus: primary FM/DMR
  • Kenwood TM-V71A: backup voice, monitoring, weather alerting, digital modes
  • Kenwood TM-D750 (arriving soon)
  • Pi-Star hotspot for D-STAR, DMR, YSF, P25
  • Diamond X200 and X30A

APRS

  • Yaesu FT-7900R and Raspberry Pi 4 running YAAC as a full-time iGate, on an Arrow J-pole

Mesh networking

  • AREDN node WX4WCS-Base-CPE510 (TP-Link CPE510)
  • MeshCore solar repeater and companion node (WX4WCS-01)

Monitoring

  • Uniden SDS200 scanner
  • RTL-SDR ADS-B receiver

Mobile

  • F-250: Yaesu FTM-510DR, plus an HF rig pending install
  • 1987 Bronco 4×4: Icom IC-5100

Portable

  • HTs: Kenwood TH-D75, Icom ID-51, Anytone 878, Yaesu FT-5DR, Motorola XTS1500 (900 MHz), Realistic HTX-202
  • Go-box: Icom IC-7100 (being rebuilt)

Views here are my own and don’t represent ARRL, ARES, or the National Weather Service.

73, Cody WX4WCS