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Schadenboner posted:What's a good I have a couple of the v3 from rtl blog and they've worked great and with better characteristics than the other generic ones I have: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/ The direct sampling for HF is nice to have too, even though you'll need a vastly different antenna setup obviously.
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Nov 11, 2019 22:14
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to plug into an RPi for "An literal babby's first SDR"?
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Trabisnikof posted:I have a couple of the v3 from rtl blog and they've worked great and with better characteristics than the other generic ones I have: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/  I missed the store link.
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Nov 11, 2019 22:38
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yeah the rtl sdr blog ones are quite good. no-hack direct sampling and every one i've bought has been like less than 10 PPM off out of the box.
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Nov 11, 2019 23:05
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the $20 or whatever an rtl-sdr blog costs is one of the best money:fun ratios in this hobby I've seen so far along with the $20 baofeng. I upgraded to a sdrplay RSP1A mainly because I really like the SDRuno software (it works with an rtl-sdr a lot of features are limited for some reason) but there is plenty of software out there that works great with the rtl-sdr, and that price makes it a no brainier for anyone with the slightest interest in this stuff. like a baofeng it's cheap enough that once you hit a limitation you don't feel bad about upgrading in the particular direction you want to improve.
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Nov 12, 2019 02:07
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Yeah, i've got a 7300 and 9700 on the bench along with innumerable scanners and wideband RX rigs, and i still gently caress with the SDR stick a fair bit. It's wonderful for travel, too. one Crown Royal bag's worth of sdr stick, micro magmount and a hunk of wire and you got ears on everything.
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Nov 12, 2019 02:46
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What is the $20 baofeng? I keep seeing that referenced
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Nov 12, 2019 05:12
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:What is the $20 baofeng? I keep seeing that referenced They're slightly more than that now, but: https://www.amazon.com/BaoFeng-UV-5R-Dual-Radio-Black/dp/B007H4VT7A/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=baofeng&qid=1573532539&sr=8-5 Got a front end like a barn door and you sample may splatter the poo poo out of the bands, but they sure are cheap and will get you going.
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Nov 12, 2019 05:23
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my funny baofeng story is that i bought one of those BF-888 70cm handhelds with no display, runs like a cheap cop radio, right, 16 channel knob on top and volume and thats it so i got this thing and thought i'd get cute and save 15 bucks by just using one of my existing ttl to usb adapters to program it so i wire this thing up - and i know i wired it right, i took my time - and as soon as i plug it into my adapter, the radio makes a huge screeching sound and my usb adapter dies. adn tahts how a 12.74 on amazon handheld destroyed my $20 genuine ftdi serial adapter I had a hamfest sell table not long after, and I put a post-it on it that said CURSED RADIO - FREE - CAVEAT EMPTOR and eight people picked it up and eight people set it back down before the ninth guy shrugged and said "eh what the hell" and got it out of my life forever
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Nov 12, 2019 05:28
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My "in" to ham radio was first getting a little Tecsun shortwave receiver (PL-310, awesome gadget really) right before the most recent hurricane scare here in south florida, really as a battery powered toy to entertain myself with if the power ended up going out (it never did and the hurricane never made landfall). I wanted to hear number stations and chinese propaganda, did not really think anything at all about ham radio besides "old dead tech" until I was tuning around on it and heard hams on SSB and CW all over 80 and 40 meters and was genuinely surprised to find out that apparently tons of people were still "doing" ham radio, and now I wanted to do it too. Their voices were mangled because the PL-310 doesn't do SSB so I assumed it was a bunch of techlords using it as even more archaic IRC. Still knowing jack poo poo I plugged "portable ham radio" or something in to amazon and ordered the $20 baofeng and the nagoya antenna everyone recommends. At this point I was assuming it would be like my Tecsun but with transmit capability and that was all you needed, because hey it's 2019 and you probably don't need all the stereotypical gear thanks to miniaturization and VLSI and poo poo! Also I can hear these guys with a wire clipped to a branch, so those big ham antenna setups you used to see are probably a thing of the past thanks to chinese magic, and I'll be talking to all of the surely interesting and cool people below 4mhz in no time. I'll be into this for a couple hundred dollars tops. I was wrong about a lot of things, in a lot of ways, and now I have another weird expensive hobby to go with the other one
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Nov 12, 2019 06:50
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Just getting back into this...got a VX-6R that I've been messing with, but today, I fired up my UV5RE I got like 6 years ago (new battery) and it happened to power-up onto my local (Seattle) repeater freq. Think I'm listening in on a nightly / weekly meeting or something like that, some pretty pleasant conversation  Can't wait to finish licensing and start doing more stuff. I realized that since I live in a high-rise with a roof deck, I should take advantage of it before I move. Don't know if I can get HF up and running in time but being 440' up should be helpful...
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Nov 12, 2019 07:15
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You got a balcony you can clamp this to stickin out sideways? https://www.mfjenterprises.com/Product.php?productid=MFJ-2286 youd probably crush it up there
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Nov 12, 2019 07:24
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Jonny 290 posted:You got a balcony you can clamp this to stickin out sideways? No balcony, but got a window I might be able to use...or just take it up to the roof and see what happens. Middle of the city means a lot of background noise floating around but good LOS to transmitters (I think a bunch are over on Tiger Mountain). I mean, after UV-5R, a VX-6R, what’s the next logical profession?
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Nov 12, 2019 07:52
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join us on the icom 7300 dark side
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Nov 12, 2019 07:59
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Jonny 290 posted:join us on the icom 7300 dark side Just how good is the display on this radio (black levels, viewing angle)? It's really hard to tell via internet because it's difficult to take accurate pictures/video of backlit screens. This video makes it look awesome but there are plenty more that make it look like the early resistive smartphone displays. It's a really goddamn cool gadget and I may be tempted to swap my 718 for one if there is a good enough black friday deal, but would be apprehensive if the display isn't great because the small size paired with what looks like a pretty high dpi really demands a high performance part otherwise you're in eyestrain town. I'm a known hater of LCD screens and believe the world should have completely moved on to OLED years ago so maybe this is a bit spergy. Unfortunately there's no ham shop near me to see for myself. If black is still black when looking at it from a reasonable angle it should be fine.
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Nov 17, 2019 22:54
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That's almost exactly what it (and the 9700) look like IRL, yep. They're absolutely eye-popping. You might get a tiny bit of glare now and then if you have an overhead + in front of it desk lamp, like I do, but it never gets washed out. It does have a resistive screen, so you can feel the layer on front of the LCD itself, but to quote elon musk, you won't care. Makes the display on the FTDX1200 look like a Palm Treo or something (sorry sniep)
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Nov 18, 2019 19:56
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http://www.randl.com/shop/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=72599 doit. You know you want one.
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Nov 18, 2019 20:01
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Not for that price I don’t I set up my ancient RTL DVB-T dongle at work and set it up. I’m doing single radio trunk tracking with DSDPlus fast lane. It’s not plug and play but not impossible. It works about 90% , but short transmissions for “10-4” can get missed if they hop sites for whatever reason. I don’t know why Connect+ does that but sometimes it does. For the money it’s been a lot of fun but as my dongle has no shielding , no case , and the lovely euro antenna it came with, it’s also frustrating. It needs to be away from the computer itself , and the antenna is garbage. Still, it can give you a taste and let you know if you want to play with it more to listen to what’s out there. This reminds me a lot of when I got into C-Band and tuned my dish up against Dr Gene Scott and just went to see what was out there.
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Dec 4, 2019 00:51
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if you want to stay on rtlsdr tier the best $40 you can spend is to buy two of the version 3 "RTL SDR BLOG" dongles. they have metal cases which help both shielding and heat dissipation, they're pre-hacked for direct sampling off the Q stream, and they have a normal SMA jack. both of mine had less then 3 PPM of correction needed, as measured off an LTE carrier. i literally keep one in my backpack 24/7 and i've gotten like 3 people interested in radio just by being able to whip it out with the tiny mag mount and tune in FM radio and some taxi traffic but seriously buy the 7300 you will not regret. i'm pretty sure it's the most revolutionary ham rig since the yaesu ft101 in the 70s Jonny 290 fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 06:50
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i'm thinking of being a huge dickhead and buying an R8600 just because i've never had a full line of radios before, BUT, un-crypto'd stuff seems to be going away, and it annoys me that a $2500 receiver that decodes p25, dmr, vague hillbilly shouts from down the road, and west african clicking languages doesn't have trunking logic boiled in.
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Dec 4, 2019 06:53
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Aren’t p25 and DMR both trunked standards?
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Dec 4, 2019 18:21
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Internet Wizard posted:Aren’t p25 and DMR both trunked standards? You can run both p25 and DMR in a single channel mode. Good examples of p25 being used this way are some of the police departments in New Hampshire, or many federal things. DMR is much the same, many non trunked applications there too. For example all the DMR radios I have for ham use are non-trunking. For DMR there are three tiers that define this: Tier I is for a licence-free use in the European PMR446 band Tier II is normal radio systems. Tier III is trunking (You also have the "nonstandard" trunking systems that Motorola sells for DMR also in the mix. Capacity Plus... Connect Plus...) razak fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 19:46
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I ended up not taking the plunge on a 7300, not because I don't want one but because there didn't seem to be any appreciable price drop (on any HF rig, what's with that) during the sales and stuff the past few days. I also kinda want to stick around and see what the other manufacturers respond to it with? Right now it feels like Icom has the only responsive SDR-based small/affordable rig and the Kenwood/Yaesu offerings around the same price range or size are last generation (or earlier) models; the 7300 has to be disrupting the hell out of those companies' sales right? I want to see something with the form factor of maybe the FTDX 3000 but with direct sampling and non-sluggish interface the 7300 is probably causing everyone to expect in a ~$1000 rig from now on, or a shrunken TS-890 with the same. I really like the way those rigs have dedicated knobs and buttons for many things that the 7300 relegates to the touch screen and multi knob but the 3000's display seems insanely sluggish and the 890 is huge and like 3 grand (if money was no object it's pretty much what I would buy instantly though, I mean look at it). Of course, Japanese companies being what they are I expect them to take their sweet time or even just stay in their comfort zones until the division folds or the Ancient One in charge of it dies so I'll probably end up with the 7300 at some point.
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Dec 4, 2019 21:09
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from all reports the 7300 is destroying any HF market share that kenwood and yaesu have. Yaesu tried to cash in on boomer nostalgia by naming their latest flashy radio the FTDX101 or whatever. It's an okay radio but it's really, really ugly. icom is owning poo poo with the 7300 and the 7610 is selling really well too. I almost tiered up to the 7610 but didn't really need its extra features. The only thing I really wanted was that video output it has to throw the display up on a big cheap 24" or whatever.
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Dec 4, 2019 21:13
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Amateur transceiver lead times are enormous for reasons that have been explained to me but have since forgotten - “not enough money in it” is probably the main reason? It could easily be another 2-3 years before there’s a response from the other manufacturers, and no guarantee that the response won’t come with some bizarre downside. And anything that they’re developing will itself be announced at least a year or two before it’s actually ready to sell, to try and stop people from buying a 7300 today, so you’d have lots of advance warning if a 7300-killer was coming anytime soon. I mean no reason to rush out and get a 7300 ASAP either. Just don’t expect amateur radio to be like computer parts, where things are outdated before they hit retail and waiting a few months rewards you with something much better for the same price. For transceivers in particular you don’t see much in terms of innovation from the big 3. The cool new stuff is instead developed by a few boutique manufacturers, and fly by night operations selling from eBay, to maybe eventually get picked up by the big 3 a decade later when it starts getting hard for them to source parts for their current models. Progressive JPEG fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 21:37
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Jonny 290 posted:but it's really, really ugly. yeah it's hideous. to be honest I'm not a fan of how the 7610 looks either but at least it's not... that. like if I was given a 101D for free (cmon gigaparts sweepstakes) I would sell it because it just looks so dumb. if we're talking about aesthetics alone I actually think the FT-991A is an awesome looking little rig and my favorite design that doesn't have a kenwood badge but holy moly does it seem clunky to actually use, also lol that it does 160m-70cm but only has 99 memories. the enclosure would be a great starting point for a 7300 competitor if they stuck an SDR in it and hired somebody with a better understanding of how people actually use stuff e: here's a cool straight key I got on YJA for like $60, beats the hell out of the 40 year old radio shack one I had lying around. CW is super fun and I'm pretty sure once I have it completely down I will never use voice again 
d0s fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 23:08
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I hooked up my old rear end SDR USB with the crap euro plug antenna . SDR# still freezes when I use it but I got DSDPlus doing one receiver trunk tracking of a local Moto Cap+ system . Two is the way to go as the single isn’t perfect given the tuning times but it works enough to be neat. I think the dongle was $20 on eBay forever ago, and DSDPlus fastlane was another $25. Not a replacement for a dedicated scanner if you need an appliance solution but for hobby futzing it works great. The documents for DSDPlus could be better but I figured it out eventually.
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Dec 4, 2019 23:11
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If you're gonna go big, save up for a K4 Otherwise, the 7300 at $899 is a drat steal
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Dec 5, 2019 00:30
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manero posted:If you're gonna go big, save up for a K4 yeah I'd love an elecraft rig, was even wanting to build a K2 kit but the prices are eye watering even for that and I'm not moneyed up like that  but yeah the 7300 is clearly a stupid good deal and I'm going to end up with one eventually, once I sell my practically new 718 it will end up like $550 out of pocket
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Dec 5, 2019 01:23
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i have Extremely hot takes about elecraft but i will never accuse them of building a radio that does not work very well.
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Dec 5, 2019 04:05
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Jonny 290 posted:i have Extremely hot takes about elecraft but i will never accuse them of building a radio that does not work very well. is the hot take "even if they are as good as they're made out to be they're still ludicrously overpriced and look slapped together from radio shack parts bins" because that's mine from my very limited exposure to them. I get a kind of audiophile vibe from the whole enterprise and it's diehard fans. I wouldn't turn one down though!
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Dec 5, 2019 05:26
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yeah pretty much. also earlier on they especially had the reputation of the a-la-carte radio so you could buy a $1700 radio $200 at a time and fly under THE OLD BATTLEAXE's radar
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Dec 5, 2019 06:29
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d0s posted:CW is super fun and I'm pretty sure once I have it completely down I will never use voice again Hell yeah, same. Any ragchewing band is toxic as hell these days, I just want to sit around on SSTV and CW and make contacts
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Dec 5, 2019 15:02
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Going to a local radio club holiday dinner this Wednesday, and yes, it's at Golden Corral. So I decided to get a name badge printed since I'm going to be immersed in that crowd, and I gotta show up Ham Radio Operator Proper... While I was setting up the engraving, I had a silly idea to troll and put my GMRS on there just as a joke. I am fairly sure there's 0% crossover between GMRS ops and HAM ops, that's my prediction at least, but now I'm actually curious to see if anyone even comments or says a word.  Kinda like "Joe Schmoe, PhD., CCNA" or something lol. IDK it's funny to me. Backup just regular one in case I don't feel like it's as funny tomorrow. OR - Alternate option - Start with just the ham call, then if someone yells at me for having all the FRS/GMRS frequencies in my HTs, i can just swap name badges lmao
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Dec 10, 2019 02:00
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Sniep posted:While I was setting up the engraving, I had a silly idea to troll and put my GMRS on there just as a joke. I am fairly sure there's 0% crossover between GMRS ops and HAM ops, that's my prediction at least, but now I'm actually curious to see if anyone even comments or says a word. I'm not familiar with GMRS calls so I would have just assumed it was a MARS call of some sort.
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Dec 10, 2019 15:44
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We had a few GMRS guys but the clique doesn't really overlap, just like most of the other things in this hobby. Our 220MHz guys are a group, the 900MHz guys are a group. Our club hooked our unused UHF repeater into Wires-X so now the Yaesu people are over there, the rest of us are on Echolink/144MHz. Some of us are playing with DMR hotspots since there's no useful local repeater. I've been playing with ways to monitor these things and looking at what sort of crosslinking/mixing I can do with asterisk, dongles, brandmeister, etc. For a hobby that's about communications is sure is hard to talk to each other with all this
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Dec 11, 2019 14:05
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How can we best communicate? I’ve got it!!! With 9000 different inscrutable and incompatible protocols! 
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Dec 11, 2019 14:13
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Just bang out some CW on a 5W QRP rig ya goobers!!! Kids and their digital modes...
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Dec 11, 2019 15:13
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COOL CORN posted:Just bang out some CW on a 5W QRP rig ya goobers!!! i am sending hellschreiber at 7.077 but nobody answers
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Dec 12, 2019 13:27
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Big Mackson posted:i am sending hellschreiber at 7.077 but nobody answers thursdays around 9 eastern, 7.088 dial freq, 1500 hz offset (upper sideband). Weekly hell net. Cliff, AE5ZA (net control) loves digital HF and specifically hellschreiber. every time i remember to hop on there are like six or eight checkins and we all chat for about an hour. Jonny 290 fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Dec 12, 2019 |
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Dec 12, 2019 19:01
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I’ve just bought a pixie kit and I’m having fun building it. I was wondering if the supplied transistors, an S8050 and S9018 would be the best NPN transistors to use? Would I get any better performance with a 2N2222 or something? I know I have to think about frequencies as well. I’m looking to improve the power output but fully appreciate that I can’t achieve miracles. thehustler fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Dec 13, 2019 |
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Dec 13, 2019 21:34
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