Hi Ivan, congrats on passing your technician exam and welcome to ham radio,
I passed my basic exam (similar to Technician in the US) as far as I know
on October 18th of this year.
And, at the moment I'm working on getting an antenna up so I can enjoy the
radio I purchased just before Christmas, an Yaesu FT-1500M 2 meter mobile.
The best thing for you to do as far as obtaining access to an irlp node
that is local to you is probably to ask on the repeater it is hosted on if
you can already access that, after all, one of the hams on there can
probably set you in the right direction.
It may be as simple as asking for the codes, the node operator may charge a
nominal fee for them, or it may be as simple as taking out a membership in
a local ham club who maintain the repeater and irlp access in question.
If you can't find out who to contact via the suggestions above, a first
step might be looking up the call of the repeater the irlp node is hosted
on via http://www.qrz.com and going from there, after all, there may be an
email link and or a web address available aphiliated with the call in the
QRZ database.
Good luck and hth from another relative new ham who's still cutting his
teeth so to speak.
73
Ed
VO1ELB

At 04:33 PM 12/30/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>Hi all,
>    Here is an (unrelated) two part question:
>
>1.    I'm curious what others use to take SWR readings without any sighted
>assistance; is there a prefered talking meter out there, or even something
>that connect to a PC via serial cable?  I"d like something that doesn't
>need to have a radio inline (just in case) but I'll take what I can get.
>
>2.    I passed my technician exam on the 19th of December and got my call
>(kc0osk) by the 22nd!  I'd like to start using IRLP (we have a reflector
>in Denver, CO and a connected repeater) - from what I understand, anyone
>is welcomed to talk on the repeater, but only certain folks seem to have
>the various DTMF codes to connect and disconnect with other nodes.  Maybe
>this varies from repeater to repeater, but what are typical practices RE:
>properly obtaining and using the DTMF codes (i.e. donations, sign up as an
>IRLP member)?  I looked around on the IRLP site and the codes are
>mentioned a lot, but not lots of info exists about how you go about
>getting them.
>
>Thanks,
>Ivan.