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Jonny 290 posted:6m runs on sporadic-e which isn't quiiiite in season yet. there's a smaller season coming up probably thanksgiving to valentine's, and a big rear end one in the summer, say memorial day to labor day. Switched back to wire antenna because the coax dipole was installed at ground level lol. (its an ok portable 6m antenna atleast). And i got THIS  New distance record LETS GOOOOO  false edit: ITS THE SEASON LETS GOOOOOOOOOO
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Nov 18, 2022 16:56
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I was about to come back and post in here, yeah, i got a dxmaps alert a couple hours back. 6m (and 10m!) time. I think for winter fun i'm gonna drag the radio shack 10m rig out and put a simple wire up and park it on either ft8 or wspr
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Nov 18, 2022 22:33
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Here's a weird question: is it possible to modify an audio/musical instrument amplifier (say, a 100W+ solid-state amp head) to operate in the radio frequency range, in order to boost the output from a low-wattage radio? Or is there some fundamental difference between radio output and audio amplifier circuit designs that makes this impossible with just component swaps?
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Nov 22, 2022 16:13
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For the lowest, lowest of bands, yes. For actual HF/VHF/UHF, naw. The transistors are built differently and all the values are orders of magnitudes off. But some hams do take a big got dang 1,000 watt Hafler audio amp, remove the lowpass capacitors from the output, and run them on the 1750m (160-190 KHz) band, because the amps work fine up there.
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Nov 22, 2022 21:53
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Dealing with a lot of RFI in the shack (probably from switching power supplies), but most of the time it's not a big deal because it doesn't overlap the frequencies I'm trying to use. Sometimes it does overlap, and i wonder if there's any clever ways to "nudge" the noise to a higher or lower frequency? For example, maybe altering the temperature of a switching power supply would do it? I think it tends to climb higher in frequency as it heats up. Maybe if there were a variable capacitor in the mix somehow, i could crank that to move the noise out of the way? EDIT: thanks jonny vvv --- also, i found this video of a power supply with the feature i had in mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP_tuAp9jUI&t=256s Helianthus Annuus fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Nov 24, 2022 |
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Nov 23, 2022 02:55
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Some power supplies actually do have an offset switch to change the base frequency of the chopper circuit and thus all its harmonics. I don't have details on how you would add such a thing though....if you find the oscillator circuit you can likely figure out how to add a switchable capacitor or something to git r done
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Nov 23, 2022 03:47
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Random retail therapy: Been seeing if there actually Are any Deals on Ebay any more. got a decent one. $200 plus shipping for an IC-2100h and an IC-V8000. I'm going to clean up the former and kick it to a goon in need for cheap, and replace the FT8900R in the truck (which i hate and have bitched about numerous times) with the V8000. I'd rather have a bulletproof and easy to operate 2m monobander with 75 smokin' watts of mountain-loving power and great audio than some quad band gimmick that I still don't know how to operate without pulling over and poking at the panel.
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Nov 28, 2022 02:12
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I was so disappointed back like a decade ago when I realized the 8900r was FM only on 10 and 6.
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Nov 29, 2022 01:18
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Spouse and I hung a GP-98 off our old composite box of rot and plugged it into a ftm-400xdr. Holy poo poo digital modes continue to blow my mind. It's wicked cool listening in over wires-x to randos on the other side of the planet from a solar powered homebrew camper in the middle of the Sonoran desert.  I picked up a ft-5dr to bounce off of the camper when I'm out and about on two wheels. Its rubber duck can't reach the local wires-x repeater. The jeep will get one in time so the two can chat with one another underway.
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Nov 29, 2022 03:49
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I have another dumb question about SDR. I've been playing with GQRX, is there a plugin or a different software that would let me schedule a frequency and time to record my favorite FM shows? I haven't had much luck getting SDR++ to compile, but that looks like an OSX problem. I've poked around and it doesn't seem a big feature request, so maybe its already common and I'm just missing it?
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Jan 5, 2023 18:57
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Vaporware posted:I have another dumb question about SDR. I've been playing with GQRX, is there a plugin or a different software that would let me schedule a frequency and time to record my favorite FM shows? I haven't had much luck getting SDR++ to compile, but that looks like an OSX problem. This is about the simplest capture method I've found: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rx_tools-rtl-sdr-command-line-tools-rtl_power-rtl_fm-rtl_sdr-now-compatible-with-almost-any-sdr/ You'll have to schedule it with some other software. On another note, I have a grounding question for folks. What's the best way to ground my radio? Here's the setup in a crude diagram (looking at my house from the top): [Main Power Panel + Grounding Rods] ---- 80' distance ---- [Grounded outlet inside radio room] ---- [Power Strip] ---- [120V to 12V converter] ---- [20W radio] ---- 30' coax ---- [Ground rod and disconnect] ---- 80' coax ---- [Balun + 40m loop antenna] I measure ~70VDC between the ground conductor for the coax running into the room from the antenna and the ground on the rest of the equipment inside. Can I ground the radio chassis to one of the ground pins on the power strip? Is there such a thing as a ground-only three-prong cord for such a use-case? The other stuff on the power strip is audio equipment and a laptop.
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Jan 11, 2023 19:30
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Measuring such a DC voltage is very strange. Unless there's lightning in the area and you measure static charge (The voltage can then be hundreds, sometims thousands of volts). Perhaps connect a 47k resistor parallel with your (i assume digital) meter and see if the voltage drops to nearly zero. Of course, never do such measurements when lightning might roll in. Grounding the radio to the power strip is good for safety, but useless as an RF ground. The whole mains ground system has a way too high inductance to be effective as an RF ground. Hook up the transceiver to a dedicated RF ground system. That can be counterpoise (isolated wires running over the ground, or buried a few centimeters underneath) or a good ground rod system. You connect that ground to the ground lug/screw/terminal on the transceiver. Use as short a length of cable as possible. I use old but decent quality TV coax with the braid and core connected together.
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Jan 11, 2023 22:06
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I've been putting off getting my baby license for a while now. I blame COVID for shutting down the local club offices for most of the time immediately after I got my first radio. Assuming I'm just wandering with a baofeng and occasionally chatting up the local repeater there's not a lot of reason to get beyond the technician license for now right?
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Jan 11, 2023 23:02
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The general license gets you additional privileges on HF beyond what you can do with the technician license. If you mainly want to chat on 2m and 70cm repeaters then technician is what you need. It's worth reading over the general license content and test questions before you take the test though, because if you pass the technician test then you get a free shot at the general test too in the same test session. That's how I ended up getting my general ticket. I had planned to just go for technician and the VEs talked me into giving the general a shot.
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Jan 11, 2023 23:06
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LimaBiker posted:Measuring such a DC voltage is very strange. Unless there's lightning in the area and you measure static charge (The voltage can then be hundreds, sometims thousands of volts). Thanks. After reading a bit I think my problem was installing two ground rods <100' away from each other and not bonding them together. I had intended the more recent rod to act as lightning protection but clearly I didn't think the whole thing through. Today on a less-cloudy day (I am at the top of a hill) I measured a less-wacky 4.5V between the new rod ground and the AC ground. After disconnecting the antenna from the ill-conceived ground rod now I read 0V between my radio chassis and AC ground. I have several months before lightning season to figure out some actual protection.
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Jan 12, 2023 22:58
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Think I bricked my MD-390. I pulled it out after not using it in 2 years, decided I should update the firmware... firmware updated, but it's still flashing the green and red firmware programming mode LEDs and the screen is off, even after rebooting and pulling the battery. Anybody run into this?
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Jan 16, 2023 01:33
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Sounds like a bad flash, but since the LEDs are still flashing the bootloader is working. Try running the firmware update tool again.
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Jan 16, 2023 14:22
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Maybe 1.5 years ago in this thread I had an idea for an ic7300 mod I could maybe sell. Turns out having just an idea is worthless. Doing a proof of concept is a lot of fun and rewarding. Making it into a thing you can let other people use is extremely difficult, time consuming, and discouraging. I made a halfway ok youtube video, and wrote like 7000 words of documentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HstbYwh1uc What do people think? Looking for some gentle reality check here. I've spent so much time on this I think I've lost sight if people will actually want this thing or what people's expectations are. I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel for this project. Hopefully it is not the light of an oncoming train.
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Jan 17, 2023 23:33
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horse_ebookmarklet posted:Maybe 1.5 years ago in this thread I had an idea for an ic7300 mod I could maybe sell. Looks awesome. The 7300's lack of ethernet connectivity like the 9700 is a huge bummer. Been planning on a way to give my dad remote access after he gets his general.
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Jan 17, 2023 23:41
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horse_ebookmarklet posted:Maybe 1.5 years ago in this thread I had an idea for an ic7300 mod I could maybe sell. Oh hey, I remember this. Great job! I feel you on the "turning it into a thing someone can use" thing. At the risk of doxing myself, I wrote a web-based remote control app for an HF radio during Covid, and turned it into a full-fledged open source project. Releasing it and announcing it was terrifying. I even went so far to make Windows binaries for all the hams running Windows, so they wouldn't have to install any dev tools to compile it or anything. It's been all of those things - difficult, time consuming, but maybe not discouraging -- although I've found my motivation came and went over the last couple of years. I have had a fair number of people using the app, and some nice hams even sent me some cash over the holidays, but it definitely didn't pay for the 100's or 1000's of hours I put into it over the years. Having a roadmap helped out, and it was also nice having some active users testing the app out and sending bug reports and feature requests.
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Jan 17, 2023 23:44
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Thanks for the positive feedback.manero posted:Oh hey, I remember this. Great job! Cool to hear about your project and the same sort of experience and anxiety around announcing it. The discouraging is more feeling it is never done. I opened up like 18 github issues for things that effect the open source app, and probably have another 5 tasks for the closed source parts of it. Just a big list of things before it is ready. Trying to aim for good and not perfect... The 100s or 1000s of hours, I feel you here. I'm probably ~500 hours and $2k in NRE, $5k in materials. My significant other is being very patient!! The active users thing is a really good idea. I am about to try and get some. Free closed beta (5), then a paid beta (another 5) where people pay essentially cost, and then go general availability. When I get there I might even ask people on the forums about being in the beta and get banned probably. I wonder if  is deductible as a business cost.
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Jan 18, 2023 02:22
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horse_ebookmarklet posted:Maybe 1.5 years ago in this thread I had an idea for an ic7300 mod I could maybe sell. This looks great, and if I had a 7300 I'd be super interested. Nice job!
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Jan 18, 2023 02:46
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horse_ebookmarklet posted:Thanks for the positive feedback. One thing I struggled with at the start, was whether to make it a commercial product, or to open source it. I probably could have made some good money selling copies of the software, but I decided I didn’t want to turn my hobby into a job. Be aware of that angle. Coincidentally enough, I have 18 open GitHub issues as well, and I’ve justly accepted that I’ll never get to some or just not even bother. “Good enough” definitely helps in this situation. Sure, it would be cool to be able to use a browser’s audio API to stream mic audio to the radio, but in reality, I’ll probably never get to it, and it’s totally fine.
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Jan 18, 2023 04:50
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I am interested in the technical aspects you've got going on there! but I understand re: doxx What did you end up using to pipe audio back to the html5 gui? For my native->native app, I'm looking at WebRTC, RTP, and maybe something homebrew nonsense protocol. WebRTC looks cool because two way natively, reasonable C++ clients, and if I wanted to give myself an enormous amount of work I could do a web client. RTP seems reasonable/old/proven, just gotta fight with ffmpeg/libav, which I may have to do with WebRTC anyway. I'm not sure how sensitive the latency issue is going to be and how much to fiddle. Curious how you addressed the problem! And yea, riding the line between fun and work, scales tipping towards work at the end of development here, having to force myself to finish it. Being a hardware/software project my hand is somewhat forced, I basically have to sell it for 2x my cost to have it make any sort of sense and keep it going. I think?
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Jan 18, 2023 07:03
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horse_ebookmarklet posted:I am interested in the technical aspects you've got going on there! but I understand re: doxx The radio sends RTP packets that contain raw PCM samples, so it was pretty easy to pick the payload out of the packets and send them to the browser over a websocket. But that was after lots and lots of reverse engineering to figure out what the sample rate was. The latency isn't too much of a problem, but it adds up when you use the app across the internet. At home on a LAN connection, the audio matches up fairly closely.
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Jan 18, 2023 14:46
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horse_ebookmarklet posted:And yea, riding the line between fun and work, scales tipping towards work at the end of development here, having to force myself to finish it. Being a hardware/software project my hand is somewhat forced, I basically have to sell it for 2x my cost to have it make any sort of sense and keep it going. I think? I did a hardware project a while back (not ham-related) and was toying with trying to commercialize it, but it's a small potential market and would involve either 1) setting up injection molding (holy poo poo expensive) or 2) running 8 hours of 3d printing for each unit. Also the electronic parts alone were about $50, and assembly involves allowing glue to cure for several hours... So I said screw it and put it all online under a CC license. I've already got a job.
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Jan 18, 2023 17:53
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horse_ebookmarklet posted:Maybe 1.5 years ago in this thread I had an idea for an ic7300 mod I could maybe sell. My expectation is that you need to sell one to me so I can be one of your guinea pigs. No jokes. I won't pay for that horrible icom software
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Jan 18, 2023 19:30
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horse_ebookmarklet posted:Maybe 1.5 years ago in this thread I had an idea for an ic7300 mod I could maybe sell. i've been following your posts about this the whole time, and i'm very impressed with your results!
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Jan 19, 2023 01:38
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Thanks everyone. It'll help me grind through this last bit of this. Johnny I may indeed come back to haunt a couple of ya with beta unit invites.
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Jan 19, 2023 04:45
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I know this isn’t technically what this thread is about, but I picked this up today for a pittance at a thrift store. It works great as far as I can tell but I haven’t read the manual enough to really know how it works yet. I did get some police/ems chatter, and being right on Lake Michigan, some marine/cargo chatter as well. It can do some of the ham bands as well but I haven’t messed too much with that yet. I have to read up on how to lock out the digital channels because boy howdy are they loud and they can’t be squelched out. 
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Feb 2, 2023 19:12
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They're great I love my scanner
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Feb 2, 2023 23:01
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Those desktop form factor ones are chill. am/fm clock radios that you can pop on NOAA weather and 2m/70cm repeaters? That's plenty of utility. Old lovely scanners are fun detectors for 6/10 meter openings. Hook them up to an outside antenna (can be cheap, CB whip or something) and have them scan 29.600 and 52.525. When the band opens the FM guys should make it squawk
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Feb 5, 2023 23:40
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I had the pleasure of driving a uhaul box truck from Milwaukee to Chicago today, so I decided to bring the scammer to see what was out there. I picked up a bunch of ham activity along I94, including some real time computer janitoring https://youtu.be/NhnsJrDRtYc I’ve figured it out. HAM radio is discord for boomers
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Feb 7, 2023 17:45
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Oh 100% HAM is where angry old people voice their issues.
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Feb 7, 2023 18:32
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What is this HAM stuff y'all are going on about?
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Feb 7, 2023 18:33
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Ham Helpdesk, or Helpdesk Ham would be cool garage band names.
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Feb 7, 2023 18:59
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join the goon dmr weekly net. most of us are computer professionals and its 100% angry man shakes fist at cloud chat
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Feb 7, 2023 19:07
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yummycheese posted:join the goon dmr weekly net. most of us are computer professionals and its 100% angry man shakes fist at cloud chat Which is tonight on talk group 3163563 (set the contact as group) at 7p eastern.
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Feb 7, 2023 19:18
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drunk mutt posted:Which is tonight on talk group 3163563 (set the contact as group) at 7p eastern. 9 pm eastern.
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Feb 7, 2023 22:13
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Motronic posted:9 pm eastern. Damnit, I constantly do that... I hate timezones
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Feb 7, 2023 22:15
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