VK6RN-13 upgrade

As I said, the Argent Data Tracker2 has finally become available again. I ordered one for myself as well as for HARG. I finished setting it up as a fill-in digipeater late Friday afternoon after running for a couple of days as a full digi. As a full digipeater it was performing quite well but is quite unnecessary for Perth as there are already enough digipeaters. Mine was just adding too much unneeded traffic. It's good to know where it's reaching though.
The antenna is a Comet mobile tri-bander (6/2/70) about 2 metres above the roof of a tin shed. Average terrain is quite low unfortunately, around 20m. Comet claims it to be useful on 6m but in reality it's a 1/4 wave at 52 MHz and requires a decent groundplane. I've supplied some radials in case I get the urge to work 6m from there during my lunch break.
I picked up an FT-1802 for a good price last weekend and that is now the transceiver for the station.
I made an interface cable which connects the D9 socket from the T2 to the 6 pin mike and 3.5mm speaker connectors on the FT-1802 (as well as power, rather than powered through the DC jack. A lot simpler I think) The radio volume was turned down quite low and increased until the RX light on the T2 operated consistently with received stations. Even then the knob is still down very low. I think I'll add a dab of hot glue to stop the volume being bumped.
The radio will be stuck on transmit if the HT jumper is left in on the T2 so remove it. The audio out to the mike is way too high so you must also remove the HI jumper from the T2. Also turn the volume right down in the OTWinCfg application which sets the software volume level. I have it set at around 20%. It's better to have it a bit too low than a bit too high. Anything more will overdrive the radio. That will reduce the chances of other stations decoding you, will cause QRM and possibly spill out beyond the bandwidth allowed. I set the FT-1802 mic gain to 3 as well. I expect the same sort of settings will work with other Yaesu mobiles connected through the speaker and mike connectors. Most other mobiles have a 6 pin packet connector so that would be a much better option (and the settings will differ from mine)
I've left the EQ jumper off the T2 for the moment. It will probably stay off as removing this jumper allows for correcting pre-emphasis built into the radio when using the speaker (which shouldn't be needed when using the packet connector) Some day I hope to hack the radio and put in a connection to the discriminator for RX as well as inject TX audio a bit further down the line, maybe around where CTCSS enters.
The power supply is a 100w SMPSU connected via a diode network to the radio and T2 as well as a 7Ah SLA battery. The battery is always on trickle charge until mains is lost where it then takes over. The digipeater ran for about 13 hours on battery on Friday before shutting down. It was a bit unreliable towards the end. Unfortunately I wasn't actually testing the battery.. I just forgot to turn the mains on when I swapped out the previous PSU I was testing with. D'oh. Off for the whole weekend. Oh well, it's handy to know.
The digipeater has no problems decoding and reaching VK6KSB-3 70 km away.