Month: June 2006

Icom IC-F3S Radio

JSEvans2 Comments

I haven’t posted here in a while.  I just found some useful information on a radio that I am researching. 

Ebay has tons of these radios for dirt cheap.  According to several websites, they are sturdy and very reliable, but they are only programmable via PC.  Details about how to do this are scant.

The programming software is Icom CS-F3 software.  It is for MSDOS and Windows in DOS mode only.  If you take your time, you can find this software on Google for free rather than spending $35-40 for it.  It took me around an hour to find it.  I’m not going to say anymore than that Russians can be friendly.

The programming cable is Icom OPC-478.  There are a few homebrew designs for this cable out there.  This cable is used for many different Icom models and can be easily found online.

Programming guides, user manuals, and even repair manuals can be found on Google with enough patience.

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My adventure with Windows

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So, I upgraded the memory in my laptop and decided to try something crazy. I installed Windows 98 on it.

Win98, required a lot of work to gather up drivers for my ancient hardware, but it does handle the hardware, namely my wifi card, better than Linux. However, there is a really big problem. It is nearly too slow to be useful. I’ve installed Firefox, Opera, K-Meleon, and the usual I.E., of all of them, Opera is the fastest, but it still sucks badly. Reading websites is painful. I’ve considered even installing Netscape 4.7, and even though that would be a faster browser, it lacks CSS capabilities. DSL Linux is just all around faster. One kudo for Windows is all of the software out there for it. I found a couple of programs that I am really enjoying. They are yBook and yWriter. yBook is a “paperback emulator” (LOL!) it can open txt, rtf, html, and pdb ebooks and display them as if you were reading them in a book. It’s a little slow, but quite usable. yWriter is a “novel builder”. I’m working on some fiction and this little program is very handy. If this software were made available for Linux, I would go back to Linux and never look back. So, I think I will keep a dual boot between Win98 and DSL for the time being. It’s sad that Microsoft doesn’t put more thought into being backwards compatible whith their operating systems, but that wouldn’t make them as much money.

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