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Bitchkrieg posted:PS -- is there an SA net or sked that any of y'all participate in? I'd be down to try to talk to some of you, even if just for awkward mouth breathing before announcing callsigns, if it means getting practice on the air. Every Sunday night at 1:30 GMT (well, that makes it monday morning - so 9:30 eastern Sun night) I'm on a Reddit net. Yeah, I know....lots of SA rightfully has issues with "reddit", but a lot of the smaller subreddits are really good. This one is http://reddit.com/r/amateurradio I'm usually the one who posts about it. There are still whiners and my default text for the weekly posts will pretty much bear that out. It's not a traditional net. There are starting frequencies for each band, and we all get on IRC to figure out where to go based on who shows up. It's totally informal. No check-ins.....it's really not a net. It's just a bunch of people getting together to dick with radios. It's been everything from a night where most everyone could easily talk on 75m and we just bullshitted to nights where we end up playing with ridiculous digital modes....poo poo no one really uses just to see if we can make them work.....to night where we break off into a bunch of different groups, so people trying to help others get their rigs on the air, others just ragchewing, others hunting down DX. It's basically my go-to radio meetup. So join up with that "net"? Or do we have enough people here to start our own thing? Because I'd be down for either. I'd even attempt to do some coordination to make it happen.
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Mar 17, 2014 04:15
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Hey all, long time no chat. I ended up dropping out of my local club and haven't picked up a radio for almost a year now. Brief summary: - The lunatic whacker/doomsday prophet broad that was sharing the duties as net control for our net meetings "stood down" during a big scene at the club officer meeting because she was adamant that we keep paper logs of net meetings ONLY and that emailing the logs would open the club up to hackers and other 'unsavory types' that would use that info for nefarious reasons. Therefore, I was named sole net control of the group since no one else wanted to do it. Various members (officers included) gave me a bunch of poo poo when I wasn't able to run the meetings due to work, gigs with my band, etc. I was asked to request off every weekend to accommodate the club meetings, which was not going to happen with the retail gig I had OR the band I was in. - The aforementioned doomsday prophet kept telling everyone to go to her website for updates on the FUKUSHIMA NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST, despite her website being a business dealing in supplies to prepare for surviving a nuclear holocaust. The one old rear end curmudgeon that was in the club that I was friends with quit after he reported her to the FCC for advertising her business via ham radio and his callsign got leaked to her during the investigation and she and one other dude in the club would talk non-stop poo poo about him every time they were on the air. - We attempted to have a net meeting using the backup simplex frequency in case our repeaters were down due to power outages or were unable to be used for other reasons (see below). I was given the task of net control on this experiment, despite the fact that I am located in a valley and my rig was either a 5 watt mobile hooked up to a mag mount antenna that was stuck to the top of my fridge or a 2 watt handheld. My signal was poo poo unless you were within 3 miles of my house, which is fine for the repeater but not for simplex work. I caught nothing but poo poo for the next month after that and was told to upgrade equipment or "put up a tower or something because the net control should be able to be heard everywhere." - The 2m repeaters for my club and the local SKYWARN affiliated club are very close in frequency and result in crossover when certain users would key up our repeater. Our club had repeatedly requested a frequency change that had been repeatedly denied by the repeater coordinating council. As it turns out, one of the board members is an OF who believes that ham groups should have mandatory EMCOMM/Whacker group participation. Since we did not allow SKYWARN/ARES/SATERN/Local EMCOMM to use our poo poo, he believed that we shouldn't be a club at all, much less get to use our equipment how we wanted to. Never mind that the entire area our club covered was inside the zone that two other EMCOMM affiliated clubs handled. - I got shoehorned into the feud between the group I belonged to and the group that runs the local SKYWARN repeater. I got lambasted during a weekly net meeting by the OF from the other club (same dickbag from the incident listed above) for ENDANGERING LIVES DURING A WEATHER EMERGENCY because I was using our club's repeater during a time that their club's repeater was in use by SKYWARN. As it turns out, two members of my club were talking about me and my callsign bled through, which is how good old OF identified me as the 'culprit.' At the time, I was in another state and the EchoLink connection for the club repeater was offline. When I mentioned these facts, I was lambasted again for disrespecting an 'American hero and life-long ham' by insinuating that he was a liar. He then threatened to go to the repeater council and tried to have our frequency pair revoked unless I was 'removed from office/net control.' I resigned from the club altogether during that meeting, signed out, and haven't picked up my mic since. I have been VERY tempted to troll both clubs at times since then, but have been trying to keep my cool despite totally wanting to go all W6NUT on their asses. I do have a DVDongle though, and may get back into digital operation assuming my ability to access the local D-STAR gateway hasn't been revoked. It's run by the same club that does the SKYWARN poo poo and I'm sure that OF has my call on a list somewhere.
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Mar 17, 2014 04:18
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Unfortunately, that's too typical of some clubs. It's an HOA for people who are too batshit insane to either ot both own a home or get elected to their HOA. Also unfortunately, this hobby attracts crazies. The latest bulk seem to be preppers. I just side step all of that bullshit. I don't need to be in their clubs and my radio has a VFO. I just twist it and move on.
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Mar 17, 2014 04:26
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Ok I vow never to complain about dead airwaves ever again. Also it turns out net was at 8, not 7, and I got to blow someone's mind talking about my SDR.
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Mar 17, 2014 04:44
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Bitchkrieg posted:PS -- is there an SA net or sked that any of y'all participate in? I'd be down to try to talk to some of you, even if just for awkward mouth breathing before announcing callsigns, if it means getting practice on the air. 40m goonnet. Let's do this.
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Mar 17, 2014 04:46
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manero posted:40m goonnet. Let's do this. Absolutely. And what happened to the guy who had the club callsign AG0ON?
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Mar 17, 2014 05:07
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Motronic posted:club callsign AG0ON? I want to believe. +1 for Goonnet. I'm in, and am setting up Echolink right now. Bitchkrieg fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Mar 17, 2014 |
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Mar 17, 2014 05:29
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Motronic posted:Absolutely. And what happened to the guy who had the club callsign AG0ON? We were in the process of transferring the club trustee status of AG0ON to me when I dropped out of hamdom. I'm not sure if he transferred it to someone else or what. Edit: I think it was AbsentMindedWelder that had the trusteeship.
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Mar 17, 2014 19:12
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BigHustle posted:We were in the process of transferring the club trustee status of AG0ON to me when I dropped out of hamdom. I'm not sure if he transferred it to someone else or what. The FCC has information on the station, it's listed as "Something Awful Amateur Radio Society."
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Mar 17, 2014 20:44
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BigHustle posted:We were in the process of transferring the club trustee status of AG0ON to me when I dropped out of hamdom. I'm not sure if he transferred it to someone else or what. Are you N2KGO? If so, it's in your name. If not....welp....it's in his.
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Mar 17, 2014 20:57
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Motronic posted:Are you N2KGO? If so, it's in your name. If not....welp....it's in his. Looks like he transferred it to Something Awful Forums User fordan. EDIT: I sent him a PM to come to the thread. BigHustle fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Mar 17, 2014 |
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Mar 17, 2014 22:33
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BigHustle posted:Looks like he transferred it to Something Awful Forums User fordan. AG0ON trustee reporting in (I do have the thread in my favorites so do read it at least every couple days). AMW transferred it to me. If someone wants to be net control, feel free to use the AG0ON call, just let me know who it is so when the hams with torches and pitchforks contact me I know what's happening and who to redirect them to. edit: and if people have ideas on how to use the call in other ways, open to suggestions.
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Mar 17, 2014 23:41
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OK, well that's good. But to begin with, the "club" is supposed to have 4 members and some official organization. I'm guessing you don't have that. If not, I'm willing to pitch in and do up goonclub paperwork/structure/act as president to make it all correct (as long as others want to help as club officers - hell, if someone else wants to be the president I'm good with that I don't care - I've just been down that path a lot with small nonprofits so I know what's up). Then comes an official club roster, for which we would obviously need to have an official membership process and of course membership benefits. I'm thinking some appropriate club artwork/shield/logo could be made by someone on here who is crafty so we can use it on QRZ pages, QSL cards, etc. With a bit of organization we can have a "virtual club" off the ground pretty quick, including some basic software to help net control deal with what will certainly be a disaster of trying to hear people and relay for them (at least to start). The stuff OMISS is using (Netlogger) is pretty good for that, but kinda lame as far as typical ancient windows only ham radio software goes. I'm gonna guess we have enough people with enough relevant skill sets to make this happen reasonably quickly. Of course, that's up to you as sole trustee at this point, fordan.
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Mar 18, 2014 02:37
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Motronic posted:OK, well that's good. Can the OP be updated to include club members or establishment of a club? Keeping the thread updated with the club would be great, but hashing things out could maybe be done via email or PM, to avoid making GBS threads up the thread with a zillion derails about benefits and processes and QSL cards and stuff. I'm glad to join up and help out however's needed; I can do social media and member organization, if that's good (like keeping a membership list, email updates, club communication, whatever). I'm still learning a lot of the technical, application elements of ham radio, so I'm useless for that side of things. Also excited about the prospect of a Goonnet 
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Mar 18, 2014 02:53
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Motronic posted:OK, well that's good. Yay 97.5(b)(2). "A club station license grant. A club station license grant may be held only by the person who is the license trustee designated by an officer of the club. The trustee must be a person who holds an operator/primary station license grant. The club must be composed of at least four persons and must have a name, a document of organization, management, and a primary purpose devoted to amateur service activities consistent with this part." I was considering the participants of the thread as members, though we still need a document of organization & management. Not sure how formal we actually want this to be. Hell, the current topic of the thread seems to be "why clubs suck." I'm not totally against making it more formal, just not sure where the benefit is other than a goony logo to put on QSL cards. It's not like we will have a club station for people to use.
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Mar 18, 2014 03:46
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Magugu posted:Words etc. I encountered a problem with my first club where they'd organise events for people to attend but you had to glad hand and kiss rear end with the right people to get invites to them. This would also apply to loaner equipment, so I and a few others finally had enough and went off and did our own thing. We started with 3 members 2 months ago and I believe we're at 7 now. I find it quite funny that radio amateurs can be quite tribalistic in nature and woe be upon the person who doesn't share the same opinion or have the same snowflake equipment they have. Don't even get me started on the older people on my local repeater, it gets quite colourful at times including death threats, wishing cancer on people and other unnecessary poo poo. So now I don't bother with repeaters, I just stick to HF with Italians kicking out holy gently caress levels of ERP and my club net in 10m occasionally. Also if the Goon net ended up on a echolink repeater or HF you can count me in.
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Mar 19, 2014 10:20
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I think AG0ON net should be CW only, only Obamatalk, sub-kW stations not allowed. Everyone who doesn't agree isn't a true ham. :shakefist: Seriously though, as much fun it was to fall asleep during the Echolink nets, could we put it at a time where us Eurogoons are still awake(ish), like 22:00 UTC? I'm not likely to hear the 75 or 40 meter net anyway, except through WebSDR or something, so you can have that whenever. 
Vir fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Mar 21, 2014 |
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Mar 21, 2014 13:25
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What's the deal with the roll up j-poles? Are they really everything they're cracked up to be? It makes sense - a nice, properly tuned antenna would be a huge improvement over the factory rubber duck on a cheap Chinese HT. I'm thinking about grabbing one for my attic and for hiking/camping. Does anybody use them? Any first hand experience?
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Mar 21, 2014 18:21
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They work great Don't buy one, build it yourself with some 450 ohm line. It will literally cost you a couple of dollars if you have some coax laying around. Nothing if you have coax and window line. http://home.comcast.net/~buck0/ll_coolj.html http://www.lakelandarc.org/articles/k1du_jpole.htm http://www.hamuniverse.com/2mladjpole.html
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Mar 21, 2014 18:36
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I love the idea of a AG0ON, and can pitch in with graphics. I think it's very important to keep the hobby alive with fresh blood. I work audio in the entertainment industry, and there has been a lot of cross-over between what I've learned from amateur radio and on the job. I use Spectrum Lab on a scrappy old pentium running windows 98 to do all kinds of useful things at work with the waterfall display; such as tuning a PA, setting gains, quickly identifying feedback frequencies for EQ, and monitoring outputs. At home, I route my transceiver's audio through a direct box and into Ableton Live so I can EQ, compress and notch filter the signals before routing it to my headphones or modem software. It's also useful for quickly recording the radio's output if I hear something interesting that I want to replay later. I've spent the week scanning the SW & HF airways from a beachside porch at St George Island, FL with an inverted-v dipole. I've picked up as far west as Italy, and as far south as Buenos Aires, mostly listening to PSK31 and CW. I also picked up a numbers station at 11.63 MHz in the middle of the afternoon. I'm not transmitting anything since my tech privs don't do much for me as far as playing with digital modes, which is really what I'm interested in. I'm going to test for my General ticket later this month so I can get on the air soon.
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Mar 21, 2014 19:09
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Agreed on bringing fresh people in. Also with my previous mentioned experience, it seems that the wheels are in motion to curtail the abuse of new callsigns, I expect only a token effort if I'm perfectly frank. I think new people just need to develop a thicker skin and find somewhere else to talk if the local crowd are a bunch of poo poo heads. E: Our next club night is this weekend where we're going to continue working on our long distance balloon with help from the UK high altitude society and we're looking at putting up an echolink enabled repeater. Bean Head fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Mar 21, 2014 |
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Mar 21, 2014 19:29
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I'm curious about what people think of this idea - I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of it but I haven't seen it discussed here. Would it be a good idea to use a small UAV like a quad copter to lift a flexible antenna into the air as a temporary antenna? It seems pretty smart to me. You just need enough lift and you could put an antenna 80' up in the air for a brief period.
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Mar 21, 2014 23:39
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DrakeriderCa posted:I'm curious about what people think of this idea - I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of it but I haven't seen it discussed here. It would probably work for receive, but transmitting might mess with the electronics in the quad. Flying and transmitting could be difficult, you'd probably want someone to focus on flying while you work the radio. What might work better is to use the quad to fly a monofilament up and over a tree, and use that to pull up your antenna instead. I'll actually be trying this myself once my quad comes in from HK.
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Mar 21, 2014 23:49
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I've heard of some field day groups doing it with a weather balloon.
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Mar 21, 2014 23:52
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There's a small group of people who haul vertical antennas up wth kites and fly the kit for the duration of their qso.
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Mar 22, 2014 00:40
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Yeah, balloons and kites are okay but have their own issues. The UAV's available now can pretty much fly themselves. Set an altitude, and a good quad with the right software and gyros can stabilize itself. As long as you're transmitting on a frequency that's different enough from the control frequency, it shouldn't interfere with controlling the UAV right? And if its flying itself on an automated altitude, it should be fine right?
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Mar 22, 2014 02:59
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DrakeriderCa posted:I'm curious about what people think of this idea - I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of it but I haven't seen it discussed here. Well, I'd love to use a quadcopter to lift fishing line and antenna rope up and over my trees in the backyard... I could get some precision placement.
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Mar 22, 2014 03:50
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DrakeriderCa posted:I'm curious about what people think of this idea - I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of it but I haven't seen it discussed here. That'd be interesting for sure and could work. poo poo you could even use it throw a long wire over a stupidly high tree too. I see the balloon antenna thing happen a lot, especially when people try to hold a competition from a lovely location like a quarry
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Mar 22, 2014 08:24
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I know of a company that did this with a weather balloon, range was brilliant but they said heat was a problem due to the air density.
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Mar 22, 2014 08:28
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I like the angle of quadrotor-as-line-runner much better. I wonder how much monofilament you could pull for a leader. Suspecting it'd be more wind resistance than weight that throws you off. Sick of slingshotting my broken sockets into the trees with 10-pound attached, only for them to get stuck  (on that note it'd be REALLY nice to hook up a simple servo or latch to detach the line if you get hung up)
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Mar 22, 2014 17:28
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At one point I was thinking: +  for line throwing (that's airsoft by the way) but the drone/quadcopter seems far more capable and less poo poo to learn to use. Not related to drones but I saw this poo poo on youtube this morning which is pretty cool :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tIZUhu21sQ Bean Head fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Mar 22, 2014 |
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Mar 22, 2014 19:12
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Jonny 290 posted:(on that note it'd be REALLY nice to hook up a simple servo or latch to detach the line if you get hung up) Nah man, you've got four perfectly good line cutters spinning on it already. What could go wrong?
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Mar 22, 2014 20:20
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If any new hams are looking for a 2m rig to get on the air with- Gigaparts has a great deal on the TM-281A. ($137) http://www.gigaparts.com/Product-Li...gn=BuzzerBeater
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Mar 25, 2014 20:46
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Full Day Of Hell sprint today.
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Mar 29, 2014 14:17
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What a better moment to post than at 1am while sleep deprived! So, I posted waaay back about visiting the local club, but lack of a car put a damper on that plan. Now that I have a car, I've visited them a few times more. Much better reaction/reception this time around: lot's of "oh hey you're new here right? I'm OH1FOO from BAR" etc, and got told about the club and it's activities. I really liked that they have a small room dedicated to electronics work, and the basic components are free to use. Also after complaining not having a radio that can access the 2m repeater where pretty much everyone is, I got a Wouxun KG-UVD1P showed in my lap and told to use that until I buy my own radio.  And it seems like I'll end up buying a Baofeng UV-B5 + a SMA->BNC adapter, as I'm planning to use different antennas when I'm driving/at home/at work, and I have a feeling that that small SMA connector won't last too long doing that..
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Mar 31, 2014 22:57
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JointHorse posted:What a better moment to post than at 1am while sleep deprived! There are a couple not-horrible antennas that work with the UV-5, the most recommended of which is the "379" antenna (due to it generally costing $3.79 USD on eBay, I can't remember what it's actually called). It performs about as well as the $10 Kenwood (loving lol if you think that's not counterfeit) dual-band antenna I got at the same time. The stock antenna is absolute trash and I've heard reports that it does in fact have negative gain (although it's not so trash that you can't get started on local repeaters while using it). The SMA connector on the radio actually seems surprisingly solid, despite its goofy gender, but yeah adapting it to BNC would probably gain you a lot of convenience in the long run.
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Apr 1, 2014 00:22
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By the way if anyone wants an SMA-but-the-wrong-gender-for-Baofeng-radios antenna, and lives in Canada, let me know and I'll send you one for free. The eBay description was somewhat misleading and I have no use for this.
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Apr 1, 2014 00:23
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SoundMonkey posted:There are a couple not-horrible antennas that work with the UV-5, the most recommended of which is the "379" antenna (due to it generally costing $3.79 USD on eBay, I can't remember what it's actually called). It performs about as well as the $10 Kenwood (loving lol if you think that's not counterfeit) dual-band antenna I got at the same time. The stock antenna is absolute trash and I've heard reports that it does in fact have negative gain (although it's not so trash that you can't get started on local repeaters while using it). I've also read about the negative gain thing, and I've already looked for a replacement. Though after finding a replacement for the original stick, I'm also tempted to grab one of those long steel whips, and maybe a mini/stud antenna and and and... Also what's the recommended connector for installing an antenna in car. That Motorola mount thing looks good, but it's quite unknown over here so that's a no-go. Also my car (Ford Ka) is lacking in straight level surfaces, so I need a mount that can tilt (or an antenna with it).
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Apr 1, 2014 07:38
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There are a few different antennas that come on the Baofeng radios. The one that looks like this is fine and is supposed to be just as good as that $3 one.
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Apr 2, 2014 01:36
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Dog Case posted:There are a few different antennas that come on the Baofeng radios. The one that looks like this is fine and is supposed to be just as good as that $3 one. That's the one that came with mine, and I can't say it's absolute trash, like not as bad as the ones people were first complaining about, but the $3.79 one performs a drat sight better.
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Apr 2, 2014 22:06
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