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champagne posting posted:Does federal law not supersede your local hoa? nope. HOA's are godmode. theyve been reinforced by courts time and again. mY rEaL eStAtE vAluE poo poo. The wrinkle is that the ARRL did get the Parity Act passed, and lawyers gutted and mutilated it so badly that it was actually a net loss for the community. Previously, if you put up a stealth antenna (like a wire snuck in a tree) and your HOA pissed and moaned about it, the argument was between them and you. NOW, if you do that, you are actually in violation of FCC rules. Basically they got the abillity for 1,000 boomer hams to put towers up and pulled the ladder up for like 10,000 people that were actually trying to be respectful to their neighbors and keep things low profile.
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Nov 11, 2021 19:32
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Death to every and all HOAs.
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Nov 11, 2021 19:51
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i thought there was an FCC regulation to the effect of having to make sure that an antenna mast, if it fell, would remain on your property. So I thought that for a 100ft mast, you had to have it 100ft from the property line. I also thought there was a regulation stating the same thing for power lines (100ft antenna must be 100ft away from power lines). The power line thing might've been a "what you should do" thing as opposed to a legal requirement. Anyway, looking at the actual law I can't find any of that. It looks like it's pretty much "In the absence of an HOA and nearby airports, you get 200ft without needing a permit." So that's cool.
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Nov 12, 2021 00:44
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Yeah, people do 190 foot towers all the time on the high end of contest stations. that plus a few feet of mast up top keeps you off the FCC radar (hehhhhhhh) Best practice is actually 2x the mast height from the ground track of all power lines. That gives you a buffer if it gets windblown sideways as well as a few feet vertical clearance when it tips over. buuuuut it's also like, insurance and utility company dependent. I, being an absolute loving maniac, have my main dipole about 10 feet to the side of and 5 feet below the 11 kV line that feeds my block. shh dont tell anybody. (i use good rope and strong wire so i honestly sleep fine at night)
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Nov 12, 2021 00:48
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poo poo that means i forgot the coefficient in remembering my ham stuff, which is pretty bad. stupid forgetful brain. guess i should probably go over my materials again v_v i'll be real honest, i have no business deviating from best practice bc i don't know enough to judge when it's an acceptable risk. im not looking to put up an antenna tower anyway - tbh the whole guy wire thing just seems difficult and prone to expensive or deadly fuckups and man that's just too much hassle when you're livin in a community. if i had a big fuckoff field where a mistake would just mean my antenna fell down in the field that's one thing, but i think ill stick with stuff thats less involved Achmed Jones fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 00:50
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Towers are hideous expenses and huge pains in the rear end. Either you have a concrete base the size of an ice chest in the ground and these horrible guy wires, or you buy a freestanding tower - which is three times the price and requires a concrete base the size of a large commercial refrigerator. People seriously pour five digits of concrete into the ground just to mount those. My play, if/when I ever get rancho 290 going? Telephone poles. You can get new, never used 60 foot telephone poles for about 1-2k from the power company. The ratio is 3:1 for buried to above ground, so you dig a 15 foot hole and get a 45 foot pole. Also they have a lot more give than steel towers, almost never break, and they're renewable.
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Nov 12, 2021 00:56
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word, that's a good idea. there's a reason they use those instead of steel towers! kinda weird that more hams don't talk about using wood
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Nov 12, 2021 01:04
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it's got a natural limit of 60-70 feet and they all want to dick wave by having their 40 meter yagis 1/2 wavelength above ground which means they need at least 70 to play ball.
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Nov 12, 2021 01:07
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ah gotcha
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Nov 12, 2021 01:09
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Jonny 290 posted:it's got a natural limit of 60-70 feet and they all want to dick wave by having their 40 meter yagis 1/2 wavelength above ground which means they need at least 70 to play ball. loving Elmers
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Nov 12, 2021 01:20
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Worst part is the only real superstations left are contest stations. So you hear these massive signals eight weekends a year while they try to top the CQWW contest rolls, and then they shut it down for another two months. And all the new hams try to snark "but i thought the bands were dead! look at all these 5-9 signals!" and the reply is "well, they dont actually want to talk to you, they just want your Point." thats my thing. i want to actually make friends and get on at 7:30 pm on thursday nights to talk to the same folks every week and we talk about our gardens and our tractors and what we cooked for dinner last night and just shoot the poo poo aimlessly, and nobody wants to do that any more. There's nothing more interesting to me than the idea that i can have a buddy named Clyde over in Indiana and every other week we get together and chat about how the potatoes are growing.
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Nov 12, 2021 01:46
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every time i try to go for that - listening in on a net or whatever - it always turns into old men being racist and stuff. huge bummer cause pretty much yeah that's all i'm after i'll hit you up when i get my station set up. idk if there's any real propagation path between us, but i mean worst case there's DMR
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Nov 12, 2021 02:59
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oh i meant to ask this earlier - why do you recommend the hustler 4btv over the 6btv?
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Nov 12, 2021 03:07
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the 5btv adds 80 meters which is a bad band you should avoid, and the 6btv adds 30 meters which is only beep boops only. its a few feet longer too and that can be uglier to some people
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Nov 12, 2021 14:45
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Jonny 290 posted:the 5btv adds 80 meters which is a bad band you should avoid, and the 6btv adds 30 meters which is only beep boops only. its a few feet longer too and that can be uglier to some people Can you elaborate on the embolded?
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Nov 12, 2021 15:20
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mycomancy posted:Can you elaborate on the embolded? 75/80m requires large antennas and often a good amplifier to have conversations. because of this, its population naturally self-selects to people that can put up a 135 foot long dipole at 50 feet up, or a 66 foot vertical with guy wires which means they probably own a home with a big lot, and are probably old racist boomers. A few of them are kind and chill but imo theyre outnumbered 10:1 by bad grandpas. and you will never find a commie on there. oh also its a big band for "nvis" which is the most overrated thing in the world, its a super situational propagation mode that the us military uses to eke communications over a hill, all the preppers read about it in their field manual pdfs, and are now going to buy a $700 antenna from some company that calls themselves "your tactical commo warehouse" and dream big about how they're gonna use their cool radio to call in airstrikes after race war begins
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Nov 12, 2021 15:30
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Jonny 290 posted:75/80m requires large antennas and often a good amplifier to have conversations. because of this, its population naturally self-selects to people that can put up a 135 foot long dipole at 50 feet up, or a 66 foot vertical with guy wires which means they probably own a home with a big lot, and are probably old racist boomers. 
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Nov 12, 2021 15:31
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re: HOAs: since HOAs are not governments (but rather, a private contractual org you agree to be part of to move into a place), their rules do not qualify as regulations, so a rule allowing local regulations to otherwise be ignored does not apply to HOAs. (none of which says the FCC/congress can't write a law to overrule them)
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Nov 12, 2021 15:37
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I finally figured out how to get the OLED display on my AmazonBasics MMDVM hat working so I soldered it permanently on and whoops now the rpi0W doesn’t turn on time to see if anyone is gonna notice me using one of the timeslots on the local DMR repeater for SAARS purposes
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Nov 13, 2021 06:38
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Jimmy Carter posted:
Do it. Ive been using a couple of repeaters in my area for the net and from what I can tell on the brandmiester pages for these repeaters . Im the only person who ever uses them.
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Nov 14, 2021 00:14
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Hello goon hams, I got my (Canadian) amateur license with honours last year, but I have no hardware and no hamfriends. A couple of projects I want to do are: Recreate the 90s IRC experience by joining TARPN or something similar http://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html Recreate the 90s BBS experience with a packet radio BBS I'm in touch with a local club that administered the licensing exam and they're having a swap meet this month that I'm planning to go to. I also live in a 15 floor condo on the 8th floor, with non-exclusive access to the roof so I could go up there to play but not leave anything there permanently. What should I be looking to get, in priority order? I was thinking of getting a HT (with built in TNC?) as my first radio. I'm ok with used and spending a few hundred on a good radio that I could basically resell for the same price.
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Nov 15, 2021 22:25
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welcome and hello to beep boop on magic waves central! Packet's a lot of fun but outside of some regional stuff (which you may be blessed with in your area) most of the traffic has moved to APRS. Same modulation, different protocol, but it does have messaging features and such (which people don't use enough!) It's really easy to goof with a lot of digital data stuff on the cheap if you have any activity in your general area. Rooftop isn't necessary per se - if you have a window you can put an antenna in/on, there's a good chance you can get some links set up. There's a very very good package called Dire Wolf that turns an audio input and output device into a packet modem. A cheap HT (I don't suggest a Baofeng as their tx/rx turnaround time is a bit slow for packet, but a low end Yaesu/Kenwood/Icom will do it just fine), a sound dongle, and a way to trigger transmit on the radio is all you need. raspberry pi's are super popular for this - My packet TNC is a 40 year old 2 meter mobile radio wired to a pi zero through a little audio interface hat that pops on top of the pi (didnt want to usb dongle it, but that works too.) you can see it working here! https://aprs.fi/info/a/KC4YLV-1 so the pi acts as a "KISS" modem (just shuttles data in and out of the radio) to a virtual machine running PinPoint APRS on my linux server over a TCP connection. it's not really that interesting for me to send packets as my station never moves, but i relay all of the local stations that I hear to the global APRS-IS spotting network, so i'm a little bit of a monitoring post for this kinda desolate area of Denver.
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Nov 15, 2021 22:39
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Jonny 290 posted:welcome and hello to beep boop on magic waves central! Would you be able to put together a system diagram, bill of materials and instructions to build your setup? I have plenty of Pi's lying around but I don't know where to source anything else, particularly if specific models are needed. Not sure what a sound dongle is or how you've wired the Pi to an audio interface hat. Where does a TNC fit in? This is the one I've been looking at http://tarpn.net/t/nino-tnc/nino-tnc.html
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Nov 16, 2021 00:21
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Sure. The pi _is_ the tnc. dire wolf gets assigned an audio input and output device and you just tell it to use the one you're using. Then it does all the squawking and listening on the audio lines to generate and demodulate whatever packet noises are on the air Sound dongles are just the little cheap USB sticks people often use:  I wanted to do a slightly different setup so i got an Audio Injector pi hat, which is just a sound card that plops on the GPIO pins, versus one that plugs in to USB. Has line in and out, that I soldered my cable to. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075V1VNDD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 This is overkill, you don't need much, we're not going for hi-fi or anything. Packet audio is two tones in the midrange region and very loud; you dont need huge dynamic range or audiophile crap. Here's my little rig:  and here's the guts:  (sorry for the cobwebs lol) the Audio Injector hat is on top of the pi zero, riding on the GPIO header.. The red LED thingamabob is a 12v -> 5v buck converter to power the pi from the same cable that the radio's getting juice from. And if you look closely you'll see the transistor and resistor that i soldered directly to a GPIO and a ground pin; the third pin of the transistor is the line that triggers transmit on the radio. The two wires leaving the front of the box go to the radio's speaker jack for input to the pi, and then output from the pi as well as push-to-talk logic to that mic plug in the front of the rig. Jonny 290 fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Nov 16, 2021 |
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Nov 16, 2021 00:28
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And to be clear, that kit you posted looks pretty good for what you get. Packet actually has three layers: The modem: this is just literally noises-to-data conversion. No logic, no brains. The "TNC": this is what packetizes data, requests retries, and establishes connections in conventional packet networks - like BBSes and whatnot. The "client": this is what talks to the computer side of the TNC. Back in the day you'd just use any terminal program. Minicom, etc. in the 70s-90s before we started doing sound card modems, you would buy a "TNC" which the first two combined in a box. Audio in/out and push-to-talk on one end, a serial port on the other. You open up minicom and you get a really rudimentary shell then you type "C KC4YLV" and if i'm nearby, it brings up a two way chat channel. as APRS became popular we got "KISS" mode added. KISS just means that you have a modem strapped to a serial bus and bytes go in and come out. They added this feature to allow people to use APRS, which is connectionless and you literally blast out packets and listen for whatever comes in and there aren't any retries or connection logic. Think of conventional packet as TCP and KISS mode as UDP.
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Nov 16, 2021 00:38
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and just to triple post, my first suggestion....radio's no fun if there's nobody to communicate with. I strongly recommend picking up a RTL SDR kit for about $30 USD and setting it up with the antenna in a window and using any number of free programs to just _listen_ and see what activity you have in your area. And if you do hear some squawks on 145.01 (or 145.05 which is what Denver uses for 'real packet' traffic), you can use one of those virtualaudiocable type programs to pipe it into Dire Wolf to decode, and you'll be able to see the data streams. these are the standard beginner sdr stick, they're way better than their price would indicate. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0129EBDS2/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_N7TH9610AXF3DH9NMJTJ
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Nov 16, 2021 00:46
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So it seems like basically what I want to build 99% depends on what people in my geographic area are already using. Network effect and all. If I'm the first one, then I can set the standard.
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Nov 16, 2021 00:47
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Exactly. A little bit of listening to see what's out there, then decide what you want to do, and build from there. the sdr stick will be useful even after you get your radio...or your second radio...or your <looks in horror over at my pile> 27th
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Nov 16, 2021 00:49
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Jonny 290 posted:Exactly. A little bit of listening to see what's out there, then decide what you want to do, and build from there. the sdr stick will be useful even after you get your radio...or your second radio...or your <looks in horror over at my pile> 27th Is this kit + a laptop is enough to get me started? https://www.rtl-sdr.com/product/rtl-sdr-blog-r820t2-rtl2832u-1ppm-tcxo-sma-software-defined-radio-with-dipole-antenna-kit/
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Nov 16, 2021 01:04
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That's the exact one! The antennas are pretty decent for anything FM broadcast and above, which sounds like what you'd be interested in first.
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Nov 16, 2021 01:14
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i really love seeing jonny helping and getting excited for new hams 
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Nov 16, 2021 05:01
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can definitely recommend recording a chunk of HF spectrum for an hour away from all noise and then analysing it afterwards, I’ve had such a fun afternoon gonna take me weeks to go through it all - 100 GB data in total, ish. I want to try and ID as many stations as possible and decode as much as I can and upload audio clips and images and whatnot
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Nov 22, 2021 18:52
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oh wow very cool. Haven't even thought about doing that - might goof with it some
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Nov 22, 2021 18:58
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yah, it’s worth it. I couldn’t do this at home because no outside antenna setup and huge RFI, but the kit was really portable to take out, and it was set up inside 5 mins (video of whole thing is in the tweets). I can’t believe how clear everything is - I just want to get my rig now, I want to get on the air so bad
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Nov 22, 2021 19:33
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ok, keeping track as I go: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-Kn1HYU7JaWKGnFhF_Bo9p1GUHMkEPtERuxZL4-GfIg/edit?usp=sharing taking a while, but so far I am doing okay at logging all the permanent stations. there may be signals that come and go and hopefully I’ll be able to set up SDR++ to let me skip back and forward in time through it there are so many stations already, it is unbelievable
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Nov 23, 2021 03:30
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you're really lucky. We don't have poo poo in north america on the air any more. It's like three jesus stations and that's it.
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Nov 23, 2021 03:35
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Has anyone here experimented with Hellschreiber or QRSS or any other ultra-low bandwidth modes? Those have always looked interesting to me since they don’t appear to require high power or fancy antenna setups, and you get cool looking pictures in your waterfall display.
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Nov 23, 2021 05:40
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Oh yeah hell is one of my favorite modes right behind sstv. Last I checked there's a thursday night net on 40 meters. I checked in for a couple three weeks last year, they're really cool and love their dumb teleprinter mode
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Nov 23, 2021 06:14
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I just love how they "fixed" sync issues by writing each line twice. Idk how they do it now in software? does it figure out the sync?
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Nov 23, 2021 07:40
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you can tweak your frequency correction ppm to line it up but yeah its still the two rows of text thing, which i think is super charming tbh
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Nov 23, 2021 07:54
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