Hammo Can


Well, I decided to jump on the craze and create a Hammo Can.  The idea was to put a 2m/70cm radio, a LifePo4 battery, external speaker, microphone, and antenna connector in an ammo can.  Hopefully with enough room left for me to put a small chunk of coax and an easy to deploy J-pole antenna in there.  

I surfed around the interwebs and found all kind of examples, some people went over the top with theirs and obviously invested upwards of $1000.  My plan was to keep dollar amounts as low as possible and still end up with a cool product.

Off to Harbor Freight I went.  They had a couple different flavors of ammo cans…. I grabbed a couple of each of the plastic ones.   Built the original one in the smaller of the two, but later decided I wanted a little bit more room and moved the entire setup over to the larger can.  

Now that I had the cans and an idea of the space I had to deal with I started hunting for a radio.  I landed on the Anytone AT-779UV.  It actually ships in the states as a GMRS radio but is easily switched via the proprietary programming software.  The small formfactor, 20watt power output, and simplistic design was right up my alley for the project.  I also ordered an external speaker, and a 12v 6ah Miady LifePo4 battery from Amazon.  Now to patiently wait, which I’m not very good at.


Pretty soon items started rolling in.  Once everything was here it was time to start assembly.  Now the fun part!!!


I was storing everything in the ammo can while I was waiting to assemble it.  Once I had it all I started figuring out a layout.  Being a LifePo4 battery I can mount it in a variety of ways.  I chose to lay it down, adding some clearance for the speaker.  Using some 3M Super Lock I attached the battery to the bottom of the can.  After test fitting everything I had a good idea of where to drill for the antenna and for the volt meter/USB charging port.  Once I had those mounted I started putting together a wiring harness.





In a effort to keep it simple, I decided against an on/off switch, so I created a harness that tied the battery, radio, and volt meter together.  I also made a pigtail with Anderson Power Poles for the various chargers I have.  Every connection was appropriately crimped or soldered then placed in shrink tubing.
  


Once I had that in place I could measure out the holes for the radio mount and the speaker.  Not being worried about how waterproof the box is I chose to just bolt through the can.  Turns out it worked quite well.


In the end it took me a bit more than an hour to assemble, taking my time.  I have thrown in a little ladder line j-pole antenna.  So far I’ve made contacts through my local repeaters on 2m/70cm, and connected to Winlink.  But, Winlink and the Anytone AT-779UV is a project to cover another day!


While this isn’t a perfect setup, it’s been fun to put together an use.  You can take this model as far as you want spending large amounts of money, or you can keep it simple.  All in what you’re looking to do.  In the future I may build another one, but for now, I want to put some hours on this radio.  

73s  K7WJV


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Parks On The Air Kanasket-Palmer and Federation Forest

Image
Today I decided to try and activate two parks.  I loaded up the FT-891, Mini Tactical Mast, Bandhopper 2, filled the cooler and headed to the hills.  First stop was Kanasket-Palmer State Park, I got there just after opening and there was only one other car in the lot.  I got everything set up, and started running FT8.  From the time I started setting up until I had the park activated and was packing the truck was roughly an hour and forty minutes.  From there I headed to Nolte state park, unfortunately they had a triathlon that was going to take place so I decided to about the hassle.  I set the GPS to Federation Forest and made my way through Enumclaw. Federation Forest State Park is small, not much room at each parking spot to set up.  But I managed.  I bungee corded the mast to the tailgate of the truck and ran my radials to a couple nearby downed trees.  With the truck smack dab under the antenna my SWR was a little high at roughly 1.6:1....
Read more

Assembling a Fox for Fox Hunting

Image
  Last week I was having a conversation with a friend about what there is to do in ham radio.  One of the things that I always thought looked fun was fox hunting (otherwise known as radio direction finding). Since I tend to be a little spontaneous, I hopped onto the Byonics web site and made some orders. First into the cart was the PicCon Foxhunt Controller, I threw in the cables for programming and power, and an antenna too.  Then I got to thinking how it would be fun to have a micro size fox so once you find the higher power one you have to get out on foot and really work to locate the other.  So back I went and placed another order for a MicroFox.  Cool unit, all self contained, so not much to say about the MicroFox yet.  Will have to break that one in hunting. Finally everything showed up!  I had a few of the needed items already, I had a dusty 6ah LifePo4 battery sitting around, like many people I have way too many Baofeng radios, and I also had ...
Read more