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Do any of you use the arrl antenna book? I'm looking for some kind of reference I can use besides googling poo poo.
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Aug 16, 2015 21:27
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i havent, but, i've heard its pretty much the bible
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Aug 16, 2015 21:30
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use cocoaNEC and GNUradio and buy one of those european DTV dongles and never, ever, ever work for a major fruit company's RF branch also what happened to jonny290
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Aug 17, 2015 05:27
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sports posted:use cocoaNEC and GNUradio and buy one of those european DTV dongles he died in the desert
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Aug 17, 2015 05:33
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Sniep posted:
ahaaha that's loving sweet, are you going to use that simplex or do you guys have repeaters that don't require tones? that's from the age when 2m was really really loving empty i don't mean like now when nobody uses it but like when there was only one or two frequency pairs and they were insanely far apart so the wide receivers of the day could deal with it http://www.hayseed.net/~jpk5lad/K5LAD%20Memories/Memory%20Menu.htm ^^dude has some good stories you all should read them seriously he's got some good first hand info on the early days of 2m, trying to tune cystals without destroying them (like lapping a cpu heatsink but a whole helluva lot more fragile), tuning up garbage antennas, the days when you were limited by power input instead of output because it was easier to measure quote:Back then, the FCC rules reflected this way of power calculation and most hams were allowed 1000 watts input on CW and AM and later allowed 1500 watts PEP (peak envelope power) for SSB (single sideband). Novice licensees were only allowed, by law, 75 watts input. at least crystals for it won't be as hard to get now as a broke teenager scrounging for handouts back when that thing was "modern" (read all of them. do it. it's worth it http://www.hayseed.net/~jpk5lad/K5LAD%20Memories/Memory%20Menu.htm)
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Aug 17, 2015 07:39
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it's AM.
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Aug 17, 2015 14:25
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when i told some friends i'd gotten my ham license they were surprised it was still a thing and asked if these people were aware of the internet. today ARRL sent me all the "congrats on the license now join us" poo poo, complete with some stuffed in ads for radio stores. i'm not entirely sure they have heard of it... http://radioinc.com
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Aug 17, 2015 22:30
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don't blame them simply because you forgot what good web design looks like
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Aug 17, 2015 22:40
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Got that antenna book in. It's full of neat stuff. 
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Aug 18, 2015 21:25
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Radio thread I'd really appreciate some advice one which of these would be more effective for HF listening. My constraints are that it either has to be strictly vertical(no inverted v) or instead relatively hidden; in case my current ideas are exceptionally bad. I was previously recommended the "really long wire antenna" and now I'm looking for something more permanent. Multiwire antenna stapled under eaves of a one story house ~12-15 ft. high according to this guys plans or 50 ft. fiberglass mast combined with the EF-SWL(link goes to pdf) configured vertically , which i then proceed to ground the h*ck out of. This is acceptable because the back of the yard is forest and a big pole is invisible so perhaps there is another thing i can hang off the mast? What about a dipole hung vertically, like on its side? As for how I ground a giant vertical antenna do I just bang like 3 or 4 8ft. grounding rods into the dirt at the base of the antenna and then wire it all together? edit: big pole would be guyed. Incomplete Fish fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Aug 19, 2015 |
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Aug 19, 2015 00:49
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yo uall have aids
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Aug 19, 2015 02:41
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Incomplete Fish posted:Radio thread I'd really appreciate some advice one which of these would be more effective for HF listening. My constraints are that it either has to be strictly vertical(no inverted v) or instead relatively hidden; in case my current ideas are exceptionally bad. I was previously recommended the "really long wire antenna" and now I'm looking for something more permanent. The indoor antenna is probably better since it doesn't need to be weatherproofed.
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Aug 19, 2015 20:09
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tumor looking batty posted:yo uall have aids no, we are virgins
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Aug 19, 2015 20:16
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assuming you have square walls, build two corner fed quad loops along them, stealthy and with a PA you can microwave your house! but really for receive only below ~15 MHz in a city you don't need a long antenna since the noise level of the environment is far above thermal levels, antenna losses on receive have no impact on the signal to noise ratio in that case depending on noise sources etc. i'd try either a PA0RDT mini whip near the roof or an indoor active magnetic loop antenna and see if they perform much worse than the long wire, the loop can also be turned to null out localish interference. i have a sony AN-LP1 which is a good match for tecsun PL-660 type travel radios, but there's lots of really cheap active loops on ebay that work about as well (sony is quite well built though) mini whip works best if you can move it away from your own interference sources, so putting it on a metal roof would be ideal
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Aug 19, 2015 22:47
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got some new radios went to AES during DEF CON and got a vx-8r which is heavy and complicated and got that rad10 badge at cccamp that has a built-in hackRF
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Aug 22, 2015 15:55
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next i just need to get… A CLUE! in particular, about what i need to get and what license i need to run a little GSM station at home
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Aug 22, 2015 15:55
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Cocoa Crispies posted:next i just need to get… A CLUE! theoretically without encryption you could do it on the 900mhz ham band with anything openbts supports see also this talk from a past Defcon
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Aug 22, 2015 17:36
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Cocoa Crispies posted:got some new radios iirc with those yaesu radios its just easier to program them with a usb cable and the software but i'm not sure. i got used to programming mine by hand and its a pain in the rear end.
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Aug 22, 2015 19:00
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I've never programmed any of my radios via the keypad, programming cables are cheap
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Aug 23, 2015 10:47
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disassembled the IC-706 mk I and cleaned out all the tar and cat hair front panel was pretty clean inside but the buttons were filthy, also the power button was basically broken so i put in a 1 cent pushbutton and dremeled the button push-thing on the back to sit at the right distance i labelled all the connectors nicely with the marker method, then i cleaned everything with rubbing alcohol, neatly removing all the marks, so reassembly will be... interesting! i did get a lot of pictures at least also the fan had a broken blade somehow so have to replace that, and gonna try an alternate speaker to see if it sounds better, grand total of repair costs so far: $3 e: 2371 MHz wifi mod complete on two routers, sensitivity seems to be around -90 to -96 dBm on the routers after mod running 1 mbps 802.11b, my link budget calculations show around -60 dBm at the receiver still meets 802.11 spectral masks for wifi devices, requirement is 30 dB down 9-20 MHz from the center 
longview fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Aug 23, 2015 |
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Aug 23, 2015 12:48
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longview posted:I've never programmed any of my radios via the keypad, programming cables are cheap 💯
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Aug 23, 2015 16:57
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gnuradio is a pain in the dick on mac
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Aug 23, 2015 17:14
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ive programmed all my radios by hand for the last like oh 7 years that ive been licensed. i got chirp a month ago or so, cleaned up some of the programs, but, it's not THAT hard
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Aug 23, 2015 23:40
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Cocoa Crispies posted:gnuradio is a pain in the dick on mac seriously I went to defcon and spent the first two days of b-sides just trying to get the homebrew recipes for gnuradio, hackrf, and gqrx to properly work if you aren't using brew like 95% of people I know in IT and development with macs, apparently the mac ports poo poo is more up to date and more often tested, but robotastic/hackrf is the brew cask du jour if you want it through brew and dude merged a few PRs during defcon to fix the compile errors I was having
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Aug 24, 2015 01:12
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also gnuradio is a pain in the dick everywhere, there's a reason their first response for "how do I introduce newbies to this" is "here's a livecd image" it's a huge software product at least it sucks less than it did when I first started in 2007-2008?
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Aug 24, 2015 01:14
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i got my uk class b license back in 90's and let it expire after finding the internet. this thread lead to me recently got license reinstated (getting c&g cert reissued was a pain). Since then been struggling to find an affordable dual band transceiver in the uk, anyone got recommendations for places to check? ebay uk prices are stupid, hamradiodeals apparently decent but admin seems reluctant to register new people unless someone vouches for them.
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Aug 24, 2015 22:17
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Boody posted:i got my uk class b license back in 90's and let it expire after finding the internet. this thread lead to me recently got license reinstated (getting c&g cert reissued was a pain). Since then been struggling to find an affordable dual band transceiver in the uk, anyone got recommendations for places to check? ebay uk prices are stupid, hamradiodeals apparently decent but admin seems reluctant to register new people unless someone vouches for them. I'm not familiar with the UK, but here hamfests are your #1 best resource for cheap gear. Otherwise you're stuck with swap.qth and qrz classifieds. There are scammers out there, get them to take a picture of the radio with a fork inside of a coffee cup next to it or something random like that.
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Aug 24, 2015 22:53
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i'm over in the north of ireland, doesn't seem to be a lot of local activity, next hamfest I can find details for is march 2016. got in touch with a local ham club, going to head along to meeting in a few weeks. one of the members offered me a ic-7400, fist and desk mic, morse key and oscillator for £500 (~$750). plan to pick that up. had my eye on a kenwood tm-71 from ebay
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Aug 29, 2015 14:41
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bought an Alinco DJ-X11E scanner to listen to UHF air band + random scanning and demodulating FM at IF frequencies (most standard receivers won't do FM and 455kHz and 21.4 MHz) for when i start designing the new DDS FM modulator/discriminator it'll also do SSB/CW on all bands, which is neat, i can actually listen to german RTTY transmissions with just a 10" whip if i'm outside the real cool feature is it can do I/Q outputs over the headset jack + IF out so it'll also work as a nice preselector for SW reception issue: the BFOs seem to be misaligned by exactly 2 kHz at all frequencies, but alinco shockingly provides full service manuals for every product, and i should be able to do a BFO alignment by ear without opening the receiver
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Sep 1, 2015 21:08
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Storysmith posted:seriously I went to defcon and spent the first two days of b-sides just trying to get the homebrew recipes for gnuradio, hackrf, and gqrx to properly work yeah lol i was busy at defcon but during cccamp a couple people near me did the same, i just used the linux vm i had with me
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Sep 1, 2015 23:56
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did the technician + general yesterday, ended up being pretty straightforward. missed 1 question on the tech and 2 questions on the general. for the tech i read the arrl book and used hamexam/hamstudy for practice. a couple nights before the test i was doing well enough on the tech questions that i started cramming for the general too, using a draft copy of the no nonsense guide that the author had apparently forgotten to take down? between the methods, i think the no-nonsense guide was very effective in terms of effort/outcome -- it only mentions the correct answers so when youre taking the test you can just select the options that sound vaguely familiar and theyll probably be right. for the general id been worried about memorizing the exact bands but it turns out across G1A05-G1A09 you generally just need pick the 2nd highest answer lol
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Sep 7, 2015 06:15
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has anyone done any sdr stuff? thinking of getting something from this list to try messing around with likely one of the low-mid three figgie ones like the HackRF One, FUNcube Dongle Pro+, Airspy, or SDRplay Progressive JPEG fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Sep 7, 2015 |
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Sep 7, 2015 06:22
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My experience with SDR is limited to the HackRF as well as those RTL-SDR dongles. The hackRF has incredible bandwidth (20 mhz, listen to every single am broadcast station at once!) and with firmware updates it pretty much goes from 1mhz to 6ghz. but I still use a up converter. The thing about the hackrf, in my opinion, is it's incredibly sensitive. You'll definitely need a preselector. (tell me if you find a good HF one please i am really interested in this) For example if you leave the amplifier on and /anywhere/ on the baseband gets a signal louder than -5db youll eventually break an opamp on the board, but you can obviously buy another one from digikey and solder it in. I do not know if any other dongles have this issue. My SDR# setup is basically: http://www.rtl-sdr.com/new-sdr-plugin-multiple-vfos/ <- gives you as many VFO's as your computer can handle. at the largest sample rate, my computer (i5-4690k) can handle like 6 or 7 of them before it stutters too much. http://www.freqmgrsuite.com/ <- useful things; used to be called "sdrsharpplugins.com" or whatever but its this now. You can also score a cheap hackrf blue, but make sure you read each link sometimes they sell broken ones but they explicitly tell you they are broken (they dont work unless the amplifier is on) idk, you're on your own with transmitting though, afaik its done through a command line tool edit: link to hackrf blue http://shop.hackrfblue.com/ its the exact same board just no case i mean idk i got the retail one but if you want to save a couple  then i guess thats a way to do so
Incomplete Fish fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Sep 7, 2015 |
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Sep 7, 2015 08:08
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Gonna be a new technician making GBS threads up the local VHF repeaters in a week or so. *dollars so u cant doxx me yoslords I actually attempted the general and got like 12 or 13 wrong. Considering I had never even looked at the general level question pools I think with some study I'll be able to pass it next month no problem. edit: if any of u nerds talk to jonny tell him his thread was p. much the reason I got my license and that he owns. tia Incomplete Fish fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 22:42
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Storysmith posted:also gnuradio is a pain in the dick everywhere, there's a reason their first response for "how do I introduce newbies to this" is "here's a livecd image" I lucked out and got gqrx and gnuradio installed on os x just fine. Now installing gr-op25....I've yet to get that working even though pybombs says it is installed...but no files are to be found.
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Sep 14, 2015 06:45
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thanks to this thread im gonna drill a hole in a perfectly good vehicle roof tmw.
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Sep 22, 2015 04:31
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if amateur radio is amateur, what is professional radio
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Sep 22, 2015 04:50
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Incomplete Fish posted:edit: if any of u nerds talk to jonny tell him his thread was p. much the reason I got my license and that he owns. tia same
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Sep 22, 2015 05:02
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Beast of Bourbon posted:if amateur radio is amateur, what is professional radio when there's money involved. I can only talk about selling poo poo if it's like radios and antennas, and that's about it. also I can't use it to talk to my coworker across town about work either or use it as dispatch or w/e.
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Sep 22, 2015 06:18
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chs: bought my first scanner-scanner ever till now ive only had ham radios and 2 way stuff, and just normal like shortwave/am/fm type radios... never an actual legitimate scanner and ive always wanted one decided to pick up a Uniden BCD436HP with a Diamond SRH77CA to go with it. Seemed like a pretty awesome price point for what it does, which is unusual for amazon and radio stuff.... now im just waiting for Mr. UPS man.... any minute now... annnnnnnnny minute now.
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Oct 3, 2015 00:11
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