The Rewards of Ham Radio from an Apartment

My Kenwood D700 was working really well on 2m APRS but I could not hit any repeaters on 2m and I could not see any settings that were wrong. I had bought this radio from the USA years ago and it had only ever been used for APSR. In desperation I did a hard reset, setting the radio back to factory defaults. Bingo! Success!

I tuned around and found a net on 147.250 and at the appropriate time called in. I told all on the net that I had recently moved to Sydney and was testing a home made antenna. Several of the ops on the net checked on reverse and found that I was reaching them simplex (without the repeater) the best distance 200 k to the north.