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Extremely looking forward to spending Field Day at my friend's ranch this weekend in the middle of absolutely nowhere, with correspondingly low noise floor. His RSU's recently unlocked so of course he bought another FlexRadio rig. Gonna try to do some EME contacts if everything lines up right.
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Jun 22, 2021 19:35
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Yeah now that i'm live on 40 through 10m and 2/70 i'm gonna run 1E (home, battery power) a bit and see what I can see. Time to see if this FT1000MP really is the champ of contest rigs! Ooh i should twitch it a bit maybe
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Jun 22, 2021 20:11
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going camping in northern maine in about a month and am desperate to bring a radio and string up some dipoles or something. I live in a city and my noise floor is about a S7-S9 and worse in the winter when people put up LED christmas lights. Recently started chasing SOTA/POTA people and im realizing I can hear folks but cant copy them. I feel like if i had a lower noise floor I’d hear them ok. Weak… but I could copy them. Also now that covid is over its time to look at figuring out what clubs I can visit and use their stations. Also might have to look at going with a full portable setup. This is a hard hobby to have with city living/renting/no big yard. I know people are innovative and work with what they have but yikes. you start off on hard mode and only make it harder from there. I literally never heard HF at less than an S7 noise floor
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Jun 23, 2021 00:13
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i'm slowly cracking my study guide. in my electronics education we never worried too much about wavelength. when it mattered, we converted from frequency. ham stuff seems pretty much flipped. does the metres-to-hertz conversion eventually click in your head like hex to decimal and you can work in both? i might have to make flashcards for myself or something.
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Jun 23, 2021 03:49
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yippee cahier posted:i'm slowly cracking my study guide. in my electronics education we never worried too much about wavelength. when it mattered, we converted from frequency. ham stuff seems pretty much flipped. does the metres-to-hertz conversion eventually click in your head like hex to decimal and you can work in both? i might have to make flashcards for myself or something. yeah, the conversion scale started to stick once i was having to convert enough; back when i first got my license it wasn't persisting in my brain at all
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Jun 23, 2021 04:03
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magic number is 300 300 / wavelength in m = frequency 300/freq in mhz = wavelength in m you'll burn it into your brain after a while. these are also approximations. 20 meters is actually 14.0 to 14.350 MHz
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Jun 23, 2021 04:56
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Great success! e: Picked up the signal on my Uniden handheld with 881 whip. Audio from headphone jack going into my laptop which was running MMSSTV. Had to orientate the Uniden by hand during the track to get the best signal. e2: Second pass 90 minutes later 
hazza fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 23, 2021 09:53
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poo poo, nicer than what I got a few mins ago. well done
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Jun 23, 2021 19:30
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Another two SSTV images this morning. The static bands on the first image are from cars driving past with their dirty spark plugs.   
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Jun 24, 2021 11:01
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Nice!hazza posted:The static bands on the first image are from cars driving past with their dirty spark plugs. Sucks, doesn't it? I live next door to a tire shop and their big compressor is a very effective multiband* HF pulse transmitter. * at the same time
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Jun 24, 2021 16:59
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 all i got on the last pass; guess I have one more chance for a full frame or two edit: and that's that; also belatedly realized i should have adjusted my carrier freq down to account for the redshift and i maybe would have kept up with the decode a little longer - oh well Crusader fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Jun 27, 2021 |
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Jun 27, 2021 10:16
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somebody at work wanted a pic of my radio shelf so the ft1000 is so god drat huge lmao
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Jul 2, 2021 17:38
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gave the ft1000 a break and went back to spinning around on the 7300. made a few ft8 contacts including Mauritania (i did have to throw like 75 watts at that one but still)
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Jul 3, 2021 09:12
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https://twitter.com/tamithaskov/status/1411349627580796935?s=21
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Jul 3, 2021 17:12
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i s t p status: built a 4:1 current balun to feed my latest off center dipole experiment this thing could withstand a low yield nuclear attack and also 3 kilowatts continuous Initial tests indicate: yep, it's good two FT240 (2.4" OD) mix 43 cores, 14 gauge stranded THHN
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Jul 3, 2021 22:13
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fyi https://twitter.com/k_iragana_a/status/1411753603358871553?s=21 edit: https://twitter.com/krashhash/status/1411725491581587457?s=21 Crusader fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Jul 4, 2021 |
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Jul 4, 2021 21:00
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Crusader posted:fyi The gently caress outta here with that. I'm clinging to my old versions for dear life until a decent fork arrives
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Jul 6, 2021 18:09
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got my first 20 meter sstv pics that were clear enough to read today; v. fun and kinda feels like fishing to setup qsstv and come back hours later to see what it picked up
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Jul 9, 2021 01:57
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yeah its real fun to just let sstv receive all day --  the id-51a came in. It's surprisingly an id51a plus 2 model, the newest version, with all stock accessories as well as an additional drop-in charger and (really cool) speaker mic. it feels great and sounds great. D-star is so much easier to listen to than DMR. and just for shits here's the current HT (and a couple of portables) stable. pardon the dust on a couple, we're still cleaning the shack up. Every one of them works (though i need new batteries for 1 or 2 of em) 
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Jul 9, 2021 06:26
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i dug out my MD380 and got so mad at my hotspot that ive never been able to get working properly that i spent six hours troubleshooting and trying things Turns out i had to set the transmit deviation a liiiiiittle bit higher than the default setting. soon as i bumped it from 50 to 60% everything started working perfectly. so i am doing a more hard mount setup  took the magnet base out of an old broken mag mount, bolted up a 70cm ringo i bought years ago for cheap + never really found a use for, and stuck it to the flashing atop my roof. had some LMR240 scrap for the feed gonna see how far a 10mw hotspot will go on my nightly power walks
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Jul 10, 2021 23:21
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ok i have a pile of 16 gauge stranded wire and i want to turn it into a few antennas. can anyone recommend a specific crimp tool as being good? everything on amazon seems to be weird no name brands and id prefer to have something decent, even if it's not fancy
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Jul 17, 2021 04:25
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like what kind of terminals? spade or ring or whatever?
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Jul 17, 2021 04:45
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oh jeeze i wrote that post a times times and i guess deleted that i'm talking about SMA. i'll be attaching a male connector - the connector on my SDR dongle is SMA-F
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Jul 17, 2021 04:51
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fuuuuuck that. buy prebuild SMA cables. Not even I gently caress with trying to install my own. Crimpers are expensive and you gotta get like millimeter-accurate when cutting and stripping tiny cable without nicking this jacket or that shield. awful.
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Jul 17, 2021 04:56
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if you DOOOO want to get into crimping your own cables up (it's a fine and noble thing, i'm not dogging on it - just not SMA) get some BNC or PL-259's and then get an SMA to whatever-you-pick pigtail cable. thats 9000x more practical and if you just go with the 259's you can interchange your sdr and any theoretical future bigger radios
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Jul 17, 2021 04:57
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oh word, i have some SMA to BNC adapters, so that might make sense to do. if it's terrible and frustrating i'm all about skipping it though any specific brands you recommend, or should i just get the cheapest BNC (or 259, i can pick that up too if it's a good idea) crimp tool and call it good? i almost bought an IC-705 today for the thousandth time. eventually i'll do it. if i ever run into a site that has something like splitit set up where i can spread it out without putting it directly on my credit card or getting a new line of credit, it's over. and tbh it's not unlikely i'll just go for it before then. mostly i wanna make sure that i'm set up to have ears on it, which is a bit part of me finally loving with building stuff for my SDR
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Jul 17, 2021 05:05
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if you're willing to get one lightly used wait till winter when the more flaky SOTA operators give up for the winter and sell it off for christmas money. even new it's still tempting though but i dont use my 703 enough as is and i need to justify the 705 to myself by using the current one to its limit
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Jul 17, 2021 05:17
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word, thanks for that - i will try to wait. it's less an issue of me buying one before then and more an issue of me buying something else before than that more or less fills the need i took my HT, a baofeng, out over the weekend and had a good time. turns out that the mic adapter doesn't work. it's dumb but i'm basically using that as an excuse to shop for a new HT. originally I wanted to get a kenwood d72 to play with satellites but the dang thing's discontinued and absolutely not available anywhere. so i thought ok, whatever, ill look into a radio that can do triband or a digital mode - something that's more than a quality/ergonomics upgrade over the baofeng. turns out that the d74 is both discontinued and selling for hundreds above MSRP even for used ones, so that's out the baofeng sucks to configure, but it works fine to jam some stuff in with chirp and use, so i don't really want to replace it with a 2m/70cm that doesn't add _something_ to play with but prices seem absolutely insane right now. i read online that the d74 might come back once the chip shortages are resolved, but even so it's a bit of a bummer. it really looks like i'm gonna end up buying a wouxun or similar triband just 'cause that's the only thing I can actually get my hands on that has interesting features. unfortunately the tribanders do basically 2m+70cm+(6m or 1.25m) so i can't get two novel bands in one radio. i don't think they make a tribander with dmr, either. and of course i need to get icom or kenwood if i want d-star. but kenwood only has one ht in production, and it (k20a) is completely uninteresting to me; all of icoms current HTs were pretty underwhelming last i looked. i have a hard time imagining anyone uses YSF, and yaesu doesn't make triband HTs right now, so that seems like the wrong way to go, too. this is all to say: got any recommendations?
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Jul 20, 2021 03:07
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that's.....pretty much the market right now. it sucks. and yeah D74's are going for a thousand doller. it's stupid. if you don't have dmr, get a dmr radio. my md380 is really well built, and yeah it's got a clunky UI, but everything that's not, say a thousand dollar HT and does DMR has a clunky UI. Weird bands are neat to have but tbqh they're of minimal practical use unless you're in one of the three spots on earth that has active 220 or 6m repeaters. don't get too hung up on that. I got that ID51 the other week and am getting back into dstar. if you have local dstar machines that might be one to look at if you could find one for a deece price other'n that, yeah. it's very much a save-your-pennies-and-watch-the-classifieds type of situation right now. i've heard rumors that the manufacturers have almost worked around the factory fire parts shortage thing so production lines may be coming back soon. but then again delta's coming up soooooo who knows
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Jul 20, 2021 17:28
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Thanks for the advice! I just ordered an anytone 878uvii plus, it's gonna be sick I'm considering getting a hotspot. I already have a raspberry pi I could put a hat on. Even better would be being able to get a USB version that I could plug into my unraid server to set up a docker container with (I already have a bridge set up so I can run netops from my computer using a thumbdv so I'm familiar-ish with the software stack). Any recs on that front, or should I just grab a cheap hat and see what happens? the id51 looks pretty cool, too - i'll keep that in mind if i can find a deal on a used one
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Jul 22, 2021 03:38
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ooh dv4mini and an antenna might be the thing i want, i'll have to do some more reading
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Jul 22, 2021 04:13
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yep i think thats what you want, give it a shot i say. goon net on dmr two nights a week is your reward
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Jul 22, 2021 09:14
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lmao i ordered a hotspot hat for like $40 but it turns out i can hit a local repeater from inside my house. dmr fuckin rules, the anytone 878uvii plus rules
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Jul 26, 2021 01:38
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now that we've openerup'd and have somehow managed to not immediately jump back up in cases outside of the deep chudlands I guess radio license exams will be back on soon should probably get a study guide
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Jul 26, 2021 04:53
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i got my tech and general online - there's been great online testing infra basically since the start of the pandemic iirc maybe you're canadian though, idk if that's available for canadian exams but it'd be a real bummer if it weren't e: if you're in the states, this study guide is good and free. read it (it'll take maybe an hour) and do some practice problems on ham-study.org. you'll be ready for tech in like 2 hours Achmed Jones fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Jul 26, 2021 |
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Jul 26, 2021 04:55
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also make that two repeaters. unfortunately neither is hooked up to brandmeister, but maybe i can find one that is. just need to program a big dumb scan list and see what pops out i guess
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Jul 26, 2021 04:57
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for the trip, do any of y'all know anything about the cactus intertie? it seems like it could be really cool or a terrible old boys club
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Jul 26, 2021 04:58
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yeah I'm canadian so the exams are different and we haven't done any online stuff at all since all the exam hosts tend to be old dudes with suburban mcmansions running them out of their boomer mancaves. iirc if you get 80% or higher on the basic exam, you immediately get your advanced cert without needing to do the advanced exam so you can use sub-30 MHz frequencies and another couple kilowatts of transmit power
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Jul 26, 2021 05:07
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Does anyone have any tips for studying for the Extra exam? I have my General and passed that test easy, but the Extra is a motherfucker of a test. I have a STEM background (albeit in Biology) but a lot of those topics are impenetrable to me, like antenna theory.
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Jul 26, 2021 14:32
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Achmed Jones posted:it seems like it could be really cool and a terrible old boys club ftfy they're real Proud of their big repeater network, know what i mean check out new mexico's MegaLink system if you're goin near that way, it's open to all and they are way chiller. Doesn't cover as much of course, but mycomancy posted:Does anyone have any tips for studying for the Extra exam? I have my General and passed that test easy, but the Extra is a motherfucker of a test. I have a STEM background (albeit in Biology) but a lot of those topics are impenetrable to me, like antenna theory. I'll be honest, i didn't understand complex impedance math when i studied for my extra, so i just doubled down and practice tested till i got 98-100s on all the other sections and just allowed myself to blow out the math chapter. i ended up passing, but what's interesting is I ended up learning all that math eventually. I don't really have any advice past that, it can be tough to achieve but you only have to do it once in your life.
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Jul 26, 2021 17:31
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