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I really like the Yaesu 857 as an all-band utility radio. It's also got a little jack on the bottom that you can plug a meter into and get an S-meter (rx) or SWR (tx) function out of. The interface is not supremely intuitive but if you have other Yaesu gear or use it enough, it can become second nature to change your tx power, tune a station, and then apply various DSP filters. It's not cheap but it might be one of the cheapest rigs that does everything. It also interfaces rather easily with a computer for chirp programming and digital modes (failure to get anything done on digital modes is purely operator (me) error).
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Apr 30, 2016 16:34
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I have an 857, I would agree that it is an excellent all around radio to start with. It wasn't my first radio, but it should have been.
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Apr 30, 2016 17:07
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I sometimes think I should maybe have gotten the 897 for a base station with all the controls in the front instead of some on the tuner knob side of the mobile-wannabe 857 but the 857 is still tits and I've never once regretted buying it.
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Apr 30, 2016 17:18
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The 897 is neat on paper, but i've never, ever spoken to somebody who's owned one. Can't swing a dead cat and not hit somebody with an 857 though. any backpackers/qrpers think it's too big, any high power portable Field Day types are going to have their own 12VDC so why waste budget on getting a radio set up for an internal battery, so on Still think the 897's pretty cool, regardless
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Apr 30, 2016 21:58
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You could always be like me and just "Eh, gently caress It" yourself a FTDX1200  And then realize that your antenna solution is poo poo and you can only really functionally operate up on 6m.. 
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Apr 30, 2016 22:42
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The people I've talked to had the 897 said the battery sucks, and they wish they bought an 857 and a big battery.
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Apr 30, 2016 23:16
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Sniep posted:You could always be like me and just "Eh, gently caress It" yourself a FTDX1200 NOTE TO GENTLE READER: said station still out-QSOs me on 6 meters by like a factor of 3
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Apr 30, 2016 23:38
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I just got my first CW QSO ever out of the way! I'm hooked. I need to finish my lessons on LCWO.net and keep at it!
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Apr 30, 2016 23:46
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Sniep posted:You could always be like me and just "Eh, gently caress It" yourself a FTDX1200 Are you me? At my townhouse I can only do a 50ft dipole at around 15ft in the air. Works well on 6-15m though, but only okay on 17-20m. Still love my 1200 though, it replaced my 706MIIG. I never found much SSB activity on 2M/400 here except for contests so the HF upgrade was worth it.
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May 1, 2016 17:57
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Radio Nowhere posted:Are you me? Yeah I put up a 6m Moxon (MFJ-1896) on a rotator up above my roof peak (any everything else around here peak.) Works pretty amazingly well with the 1200 I gotta say. Just waiting for that sporadic E to come back in season.
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May 1, 2016 18:23
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Jonny 290 posted:The best starter rig if you want to dabble with HF as well as fall back to just local chatting is gonna be one of the radios we term 'swiss army knife' rigs HOLY poo poo that is way more than I counted on spending. I'll keep an eye out during estate and garage sales though and hope I find something good. Ideally I want something portable as I am hopefully moving soon.
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May 2, 2016 20:04
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EME is all about link budget. Unfortunately for you, there is a shitload of path loss. Fortunately for you, there are 'big gun' stations that quite literally stay on the air to give newbies with smaller stations a shot at EME contacts. If they've got 15 db more antenna gain than you, that's 15db less that you need. Also you get about 6 db of gain when the moon is near the horizon; 'beginner' EMEers don't even run elevation rotators usually because they live in the low-moon ground gain area.
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May 3, 2016 17:54
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BaseballPCHiker posted:HOLY poo poo that is way more than I counted on spending. I'll keep an eye out during estate and garage sales though and hope I find something good. Ideally I want something portable as I am hopefully moving soon. Yeah, it really is a lot as an entry point. I realize that the rabbit hole gets deeper and deeper but goddamn.  As an apartment-dweller on a budget, it feels like I'll never break into doing HF (due to both cost and antenna requirements that I can't satisfy by living in an apartment).
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May 10, 2016 21:42
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i've spent hundreds of hours and tons of engineering brain power on running stations in apartment buildings and such and every time it gets trounced by a camping weekend where I pull the radio out and go hit the woods with a random wire in a tree. RFI is monstrous in urban areas on HF.
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May 10, 2016 21:47
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Apartment HF depends largely on how sneaky you are and/or what sort of shenanigans your landlord is willing to put up with. For me there was an element of fun in seeing what I could get away with. I had a Buddipole that I'd put up on a portable mast in my parking space and run the coax back through the sliding glass door, with decent results. I couldn't leave it there when I wasn't using it so putting up and taking down the antenna got annoying but them's the breaks. Someone else drilled a SO-239 connector into the back of the nearest downspout and loaded it through an antenna tuner. ("It's always better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.") Another popular option if you are on the ground floor and close enough to the parking lot is to mount a mobile antenna on your car, park as close to your apartment as you can manage, and run coax from the car to your window when you want to use it from inside the apartment. There's also asking the landlord for roof access or putting things like mobile antennas or Buddisticks out on the balcony. You can even buy clamps for hanging small vertical antennas off your balcony railing. You won't be a big gun by any means but it's not all doom and gloom. A lot of QRP operation technique applies.
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May 11, 2016 00:00
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One trick I did was in a 3 story apartment building where I was on the first floor. Next to my apartment a bunch of 1.5" PVC drain lines ran down from the roof for the A/C exchangers up there. I noted the type and size of pipe, went and bought 30 feet of it and white ziptied it to the existing bundle under cover of evening. Ran a magnet-wire long wire off the top to a tree for HF and had a vertical dipole for 2m/70cm. Nobody ever said a thing. Who's going to peer at a bunch of HVAC drains?
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May 11, 2016 00:30
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I did the Buddipole-on-the-weekend trick while I was at the apartment too. I was also on the ground floor so I could run the feed line through a hole in a board that I'd cut to mate up with the track in the sliding door so it wouldn't crimp the coax or let the hot or cold air out. Before that I had an Alpha vertical on a tripod, because I am a strong proponent of spending 40%-70% of the price of what you really want on something that will produce relatively unsatisfactory results before giving up and spending a total of 140%-170% to get what you wanted in the first place plus some expensive closet ballast. If I were on one of the higher floors I probably would have tried to rig it on a bracket clamp to the balcony railing. My building was on the south slope of what passes for a hill in mid-MI and my apartment was on the south side of the building, so at least I had a nice unimpeded line of sight in one direction off the patio.
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May 11, 2016 00:43
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Jonny 290 posted:One trick I did was in a 3 story apartment building where I was on the first floor. Next to my apartment a bunch of 1.5" PVC drain lines ran down from the roof for the A/C exchangers up there. You sneaky little bastard... That may give me an idea.
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May 11, 2016 02:19
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Jonny 290 posted:One trick I did was in a 3 story apartment building where I was on the first floor. Next to my apartment a bunch of 1.5" PVC drain lines ran down from the roof for the A/C exchangers up there. What a great idea... I actually have a private balcony but it has an overhang above it. I'm sure I could put an antenna on there. Buddipole seems like a way to go. Beyond that, though, the cost of HF transceivers is a little too rich for my blood at the moment. EDIT: To that end, would it be worth looking into the inexpensive SDRs on the market? Macintosh HD fucked around with this message at 05:12 on May 11, 2016 |
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May 11, 2016 05:02
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Going camping and brining my yaesu vx-6. I have a good antenna but wondering if there is any point to one of those long ones you throw up in a tree with this radio?
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May 11, 2016 16:10
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If you want to listen to AM Shortwave stations go for it. If I recall, it has wideband, but won't do CW or SSB, and of course it's TX only on 2m and 440.
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May 11, 2016 16:18
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AbsentMindedWelder posted:If you want to listen to AM Shortwave stations go for it. If I recall, it has wideband, but won't do CW or SSB, and of course it's TX only on 2m and 440. and 220  
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May 11, 2016 16:23
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Would TX on 2m/70cm.. work.. with one of those? Would RX be.. worse?
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May 11, 2016 17:30
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A longwire is not going to TX well on 2m/70cm. You might hit a harmonic and find a spot you could transmit with an SWR analyzer, but I would not count on this.
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May 11, 2016 17:34
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If by "wire you throw up in a tree" you mean "roll up J-pole," then sure.
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May 11, 2016 17:41
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For me, HF is where all the fun is at, even if it means putting up with substandard antenna conditions. If you find out you're into digital modes or CW, you'll get much better results over voice. Weak signal modes like JT-65 and JT-9 are really crazy in terms of what they can do outside of ideal conditions.
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May 11, 2016 18:00
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I have this: http://www.diamondantenna.net/srh77ca.html Would a roll up J-pole be significantly better?
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May 11, 2016 22:23
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Those are nice for HT mounted whips, for sure, but yeah the advantage to the J-pole is a: has a bit more gain but mainly b: you can hang it higher and run coax to it. It's a pain in the butt to sit there with your HT in the sweet spot as you talk.
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May 11, 2016 23:15
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How far away from my main electrical service entry do I need to keep RG8X to avoid tuning in to 60hz all the time? My nerd hobby room is in a finished basement with drywall over concrete, but if I drill beside my utility entry, I can pop into a little breaker box cabinet. I'm going to be lucky to get 8 inches away from mains. Will that be sufficient for 2m and some HF?
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May 18, 2016 04:51
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Assuming I'm hooking it up to a full PC and not trying to run standalone or use something with a tiny CPU like a Raspberry Pi, can anyone tell me why I might want the larger FPGA on a bladeRF? I'm mostly interested in it to dink around with cell tower emulation. Is there anything I might want to get in to later where I'll really be kicking myself for getting the x40 instead of the x115?
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May 18, 2016 14:55
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eddiewalker posted:How far away from my main electrical service entry do I need to keep RG8X to avoid tuning in to 60hz all the time? You should be fine, if you have issues, or are paranoid, throw on a bunch of ferrite beads to kill any common mode currents..
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May 18, 2016 16:20
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Any of you have experience taking over an expired callsign? The callsign was my father's. I have death certificates so that's no big deal. I'm interested in wait time as it appears that I'd have to send in the request via snail mail, not the online system.
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May 19, 2016 03:10
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Your new rigs so far from Dayton: Elecraft KX2 80-10 QRP: https://twitter.com/KF7IJZ/status/733716760751443968 Yaesu FT-891 160-6m - I think this is a horrible mistake: https://twitter.com/WW1X/status/733699098881196036 Not-model-numbered yet Kenwood 2m/220/440 *with D-Star*: https://twitter.com/W2MDW/status/733650324997713920 I like the display on this one.
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May 20, 2016 19:53
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Jonny 290 posted:
If they discontinue the 857 for that then agreed, it is a horrible mistake. Topping out at 6M makes it very much not an 857 replacement.
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May 20, 2016 20:26
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Yeah, that's my angle. The only people that want a remote head HF-only radio are the ones that already have a Kenwood 480 remote mounted, serious ops with a huge Hi-Q on their roof. Not much of a new-ham radio at all.
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May 20, 2016 20:34
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The case and keypad on that Kenwood HT are terrible. The display is growing on me!
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May 20, 2016 20:43
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I'm thinking about heading down to Dayton tomorrow. Anyone else going to be there who might be interested in getting some beers or something? I guess anyone from the Cleveland/Akron areas is free to ride along if you can find your way to Medina. If I go on my own I'll probably be leaving here around 10 AM and heading back whenever I get bored, obviously if I have a passenger we'd solidify those plans a bit more.
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May 20, 2016 21:15
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So far, i dont think anybody cares about the Kenwood, everybody's going "ummm yeah i guess the display is bright but its not an 857 replacement" on the 891, and people are going absolutely apeshit and selling their grandchildren for a KX2. i have a feeling that 817's are about to be dumped on the used market en masse
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May 21, 2016 00:05
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Jonny 290 posted:and people are going absolutely apeshit and selling their grandchildren for a KX2. elecrafttruebelievers.txt They have their marketing down. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. But there are hard core company line people who will buy anything they release, no matter how bad it is when it first comes out. (the KX3 was a disaster at first but the apologists are fine with that because the president/ceo responds to their posts on the forum).
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May 21, 2016 04:09
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Jonny 290 posted:Wow, somebody else knows 220 exists. I have a 220 up at our club in the NE, and it gets activity when people know it is there. Trying to avoid our club linking it to the 2 meter since that will kill it's usefulness, but 220 is cool.
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May 21, 2016 13:21
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