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i gave the Agilent INA-10386 MMIC a try, it's a more robust design than the Mini-Circuits types, just apply a bias current through a resistor and get 25 dB gain at 1.5 GHz, no problems achieving that either. i used a Tusonix ceramic pi filter after that as a choke unfortunately the higher noise figure (~3dB) combined with the insertion loss of the 1090 MHz filter I built (~2 dB) in made my ADS-B station perform much worse with it connected. I guess if I had a much lossier coax feed and possibly less GSM interference it would add up, but with 50 cm of RG-405 to the GP antenna the system performs about as well as it can without needing a LNA also did some experiments with a interdigital 1090 filter using copper tape on FR-4 but that didn't really work at all. might try to calculate the values ahead of time instead of eyeballing it next time
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May 10, 2014 16:41
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| # ? May 13, 2024 07:11 |
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   THE FUTURE IS NOW http://hackaday.com/2014/05/12/oinker-is-twitter-for-hams/
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May 15, 2014 13:53
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got to go HAM / callsign like a motherfucker / let these niggaz know who i am
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May 15, 2014 14:51
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did some range testing yesterday using a cross band repeater at my apartment, turns out my suspicion that 70cm is better than 2m for urban environments was definitely true, 70cm signal was much stronger at both receive and transmit at 1-2 kms range definitely buying a 70cm packet radio to run my hotspot from now on, vhf isn't a good choice for where I live
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May 15, 2014 16:28
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i love that this isn't archives yet  So i've been busy over the past month or so. We have obvious news (if you've read job thread you know)  I now have THE ULTIMATE MOBILE HAM POSTING STATION We will be documenting the radio and tech build, along with renovations. Initial thoughts: -37 feet overall length, taking in the cab slope, probably right around 33 feet along the roofline. That fits a 20 meter dipole front to back. -Art Bell's is about like this size and he runs a loop up there, on like 3' standoffs -In motion, we cannot have ANY additional height. this thing's 12'6" or so and 13' is the federal limit. So everything will need to either ride low or be extendible/pivoting to deploy and pack up. This isn't as much of a problem as you think, as only the frame of the motorhome is aluminum, the skin is fiberglass so it's not going to interfere that much. -House battery bank is 2x6v 120 Ah lead-acid footbreakers. Not sure of condition. That's a LOT of Field Daying. Love you guys, thanks for keeping the lights on while I've been off being weird. Jonny 290 fucked around with this message at 15:18 on May 22, 2014 |
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May 22, 2014 15:16
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archives are hosed and there's a real chance the thread will simply disappear if it goes to archives, so i think we should keep bumping this until archives are fixed.
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May 22, 2014 15:19
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basically 
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May 22, 2014 16:18
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Jonny 290 posted:i love that this isn't archives yet this is awesome. congrats my wife and i were just talking about buying a class C motorhome in a few years. i've been lurking on the old fart RV ham forums, some RV hamshacks are 
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May 22, 2014 16:19
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Jonny 290 posted:i love that this isn't archives yet nice!!
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May 22, 2014 19:43
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Living the American Dream. 
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May 22, 2014 19:46
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do u need a different class license or smth to drive that?
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May 22, 2014 20:51
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nope not at all so here's a few things that i'm looking at refurbishing it with, after we dump a few hundred into a tuneup and hardwood flooring/new curtains: 200w solar kit. this doesnt like let us run the a/c all day, but will really stretch out the battery bank and give us much longer runtime between generator runs i'm also replacing the awful power converter (converts 120v generator or shore power to 12V to power the 12v house circuits and charge the batteries) with modern switching tech - this bad boy is a smart 3-state charger that will baby my batteries and give up to 55 amps of 12VDC all day long - clean and regulated, unlike the stock power converter, which is pretty much just a transformer with diodes on the rear end end. No filtering at all. those will all work super hard to power four of these:  the trojan t105 is one of the workhorse RV deep cycle batteries. it's old school, you pull the caps and add distilled water and blah blah. your reward for doing this weekly maintenance is a battery that gives enormous capacity for 5-10 years if properly charged and not drained too far oh and hanging off that we'll have: 100W pure sine wave inverter. i will be adding new outlets up by the TV/entertainment center, one up by the kitchen table, one in the wiring closet, and one back in the bedroom. They'll run to a little aux breaker box hanging off the inverter. The idea is to not buy a ginormous inverter thats capable of running the washer and coffee maker and TV all at once, but just to have separate circuits for low power draw stuff that needs clean juice. This also cleanly solves the 'phantom power' problem that most consumer electronics has, because the inverter has a remote power switch that I'll mount up by the control panel - cut it off, all the TV's and wall warts get cut hard. on top of this i'm allocating 500 bucks or so for various wiring, switches, meters and monitors. i'm throwing a cisco AP in here for wifi access, will be running my Synology (need a couple new hard drives) and get a 4G hotspot. Jonny 290 fucked around with this message at 02:29 on May 26, 2014 |
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May 26, 2014 02:23
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Jonny 290 posted:nope not at all plz photoblog the entire process or @ least take pics along the way i'm super excited to see this materialize
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May 26, 2014 03:20
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yah we're going to do a blog and youtube series on the whole thing, hell, maybe i can get some blog hits + buzz about the whole thing and somebody will throw me a neat job opp or something
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May 26, 2014 04:02
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jonny love and the preacher's rv
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May 26, 2014 05:37
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Radio Free Colorado with your host Jonny290 yospos bithc
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May 26, 2014 08:24
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Jonny 290 posted:
this is probably a good converter b/c it doesn't have a fancy enclosure
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May 26, 2014 08:26
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spankmeister posted:this is probably a good converter b/c it doesn't have a fancy enclosure true, all good electronics are designed to rack mount some way or another
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May 30, 2014 20:20
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Yeah, to update this thread, we got the RV, internal reno starts now We're sourcing our deep cycle batts from Sam's Club, curiously - they rate almost as good as the Trojan industry standards, and are 30 bucks less each. 4x 6volt 220 AH capacity. So, 12V, 440 AH = 5280 watt-hours of power at full discharge (but you don't want to discharge below 50% at all, and 75% if you can help it) The RV has a Winegard analog TV antenna that cranks up with a little knob on the ceiling. It's fuckin adorable and I am going to wire it up to the new TVs for OTA HD. Not sure on the ham angle, I don't know if I want to build my station more around the driver's cab, or elsewhere.
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May 30, 2014 20:49
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Jonny 290 posted:
i don;t know what the max distance for the cat v run could be but i've heard of people making them pretty long. don't know how practical it is, haven't thought it all the way through. edit: looks like the ic-7000 uses some stupid proprietary icom Moon Cable Dijkstra fucked around with this message at 21:12 on May 30, 2014 |
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May 30, 2014 21:03
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I still say you need to build a long-wire shortwave antenna with a balloon and a hydrogen generator bonus points if you hook it up to a linear amp and make the balloon explode
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May 30, 2014 22:10
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Dijkstra posted:when i was daydreaming about this the other day i figured id get something with a removable head like an that's exactly what i did with my bmw. First, I ran 3 runs of cat5 between the dash and the trunk, then I soldered a male USB pigtail to my IC-208's control head contacts, and a female to the radio's contacts. Then I took another USB extension, wired them to four wires of one of the cat5 runs, speaker on another pair, and hooked it up. Used another cat5 run for the microphone - it's fortunately rj45 anyways so, super easy. just wire it straight through, no need for twist fuckery it's low frequency digital and analog e: i'd love to at least run coax/power to the front position so i can pop my 735 up there (and eventually get a 706) and run some HF mobile, this is my one chance for HF mobile glory and i dont want to squander it lol atomicthumbs posted:I still say you need to build a long-wire shortwave antenna with a balloon and a hydrogen generator you mean the lead-acid batteries in my basement that generate hydrogen all day?
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May 31, 2014 01:43
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i just got a rtl-sdr, hooked it up and i'm able to get local FM radio. is there a list of commonly used frequencies or interesting things to check out? just scanned through 100-600mhz without seeing much
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May 31, 2014 07:12
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radioreference.com is your new bible, they should have a frequency guide for your area general areas of interest: 88-108 FM 108-138 (AM mode) aircraft 144-148 2 meter ham (look around 146-147) 148-160 old public service systems, small town cops 160-162 is rail iirc 162.4 is where you'll start to see weather stations theres a big military band from like 230-380, if you're near a base you will find things then 440-450 is 70cm ham 450-470 is the UHF public service, lots of cops etc, taxis, so on then not much until you get up into 700 and 800 MHz, you will find modern public service there, often digital 928-950 is where I found all the remote uplinks for the local FM stations (use FM wide)
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May 31, 2014 16:01
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 I finally caved in and bought a HF upconverter for my SDR dongle, I ended up with a japanese design which fits a small R820t dongle inside a box with the mixer and has a manual gain control. as expected my reception is still pretty poo poo, mostly picks up shortwave radio stations, that signal at 12195 kHz is apparently a russian diplomatic station (un)fortunately the designer seems to have been unaware of the amount of conducted emissions noise a USB 5V rail has, when I powered it directly from the computer the noise was so bad I could barely hear anything at all, moving to a usb hub provides cleaner power, but I'll have to build a noise filter into the USB cable for this to work well. i should have some TDK ACH32C-104 filters left over at work that I can hack into the cable tomorrow
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Jun 3, 2014 18:10
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i feel like i should have a ham license or w/e
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Jun 4, 2014 04:21
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Bloody posted:i feel like i should have a ham license or w/e do it
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Jun 9, 2014 05:02
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what are the resources i should check out and how much does it cost and poo poo
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Jun 9, 2014 05:22
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r u American?
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Jun 9, 2014 05:52
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yes 
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Jun 9, 2014 05:52
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there's 3 exams technician general extra. u can take all 3 in one sitting. extra is rly hard tech is ezpz and general is kinda difficult but not too bad and a good target to shoot for. that's what I've got. it's like :tenbux: or smth like that and hamstudy.org is what I used. the question pool is published by the FCC so that hamstudy site just breaks it down and uses flash cards and keeps track of what u get right and wrong, there's lots of free resources out there that are good, it's just whatever works for u
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Jun 9, 2014 06:01
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General is good cause it opens up a lot of spectrum for u to transmit on. extra opens more, but as I was saying it's not an easy test to pass
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Jun 9, 2014 06:03
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Jonny 290 posted:radioreference.com is your new bible, they should have a frequency guide for your area i forgot to thank you for this, i've found a few cool things already. my initial scan didn't find anything besides broadcast FM, but once i found the rtl gain setting was able pick up quite a lot
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Jun 9, 2014 08:47
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PuTTY riot posted:there's 3 exams technician general extra. u can take all 3 in one sitting. extra is rly hard tech is ezpz and general is kinda difficult but not too bad and a good target to shoot for. that's what I've got. it's like :tenbux: or smth like that and hamstudy.org is what I used. the question pool is published by the FCC so that hamstudy site just breaks it down and uses flash cards and keeps track of what u get right and wrong, there's lots of free resources out there that are good, it's just whatever works for u started ham studying .orging last night got like 35% of the way through the flash cards for technician, was getting ~90% of them on the first try. bits i didnt know the most are the TLAs and poo poo involving callsigns. ee stuff was refreshingly trivial which was nice
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Jun 10, 2014 16:06
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Bloody posted:started ham studying .orging last night got like 35% of the way through the flash cards for technician, was getting ~90% of them on the first try. bits i didnt know the most are the TLAs and poo poo involving callsigns. ee stuff was refreshingly trivial which was nice ya see the nice thing is u can go back and just ignore the ee stuff and focus on the rules. theres a bunch of dumb poo poo u just have to rote memorize like 'when is the only time its acceptable to transmit music on ham freqs?' a: when incidental to the authorized re-transmission of the ISS
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Jun 10, 2014 16:09
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PuTTY riot posted:ya see the nice thing is u can go back and just ignore the ee stuff and focus on the rules. theres a bunch of dumb poo poo u just have to rote memorize like 'when is the only time its acceptable to transmit music on ham freqs?' a: when incidental to the authorized re-transmission of the ISS  does this mean i cant sing on ham? f u fcc
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Jun 10, 2014 16:22
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Passed my Technican exam, easy peasy. Getting my call sign later this week, ordered a cheapo baofeng to lean the ropes on. Need to find a good elmer who isn't a weirdo...
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Jun 10, 2014 16:23
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Low-Pass Filter posted:Passed my Technican exam, easy peasy. Getting my call sign later this week, ordered a cheapo baofeng to lean the ropes on. Need to find a good elmer who isn't a weirdo...  Bloody posted:
ya sorry, not even happy birthday or nothin
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Jun 10, 2014 16:26
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i tell u what tho, having my radio on me when tornado sirens were going off yesterday was a relief esp when the skywarn ppl hop on and take over the repeater and start giving reports.
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Jun 10, 2014 16:27
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| # ? May 13, 2024 07:11 |
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crs finished all the flashcards for technician, pretty confident i could pass it right now, gonna start on general
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Jun 11, 2014 03:56
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