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Due to some good luck with a situation at work I'm in the position to obtain an amateur radio license (all of them) on the company dollar / company time. As the majority of my work is currently in the area of GPS simulation and this will hopefully help to firm up my understanding of radio technology. I've been looking into the licensing requirements in Australia on the WIA (Wireless Institute of Australia). There are three grades of license available: Foundation, Standard & Advanced. I'm looking to get all three of these licenses as quickly as possible. For each of these licenses they mention a multiple choice test and a course, however it doesn't appear that they verify that you have indeed taken the course at any point. Does anyone here know if the courses are mandatory or can I just take the tests? Any advice would be much appreciated! EDIT: If anyone knows of good test banks/guides to help me pass the tests are available that would be very helpful, I haven't been able to find much on the Australian tests 
yoloer420 fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Apr 21, 2009 |
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Apr 21, 2009 07:36
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I've sorted out my licensing requirements, so I'll have my standard license in six weeks or so, advanced a few months after. I'm planning on getting into software defined radio, is anyone else here using software radios? I was looking at the URSP2 with a selection of daughter boards. My research is primarily in the area of GPS, so I was wanting to play with the bands around 1.2-1.5Ghz so that I could get a better idea of data communications in that general band (I know I can't legally transmit on GPS frequencies, I have an EM shielded lab for that). As such I was looking at the 1150 MHz - 1450 MHz & 1.5-2.1 GHz daughter boards. Is there much voice communication in those bands? I'd love to get into voice stuff also, however work likely won't pay for "standard" voice comms hardware as that is out of my area of research. Edit: I've looked into it further, I should be able to construct TX/RX daughterboards for the URSP2 that do 1Mhz-250Mhz quite easily, however these only broadcast at 100mW or so, is it trivial to amplify that once the signal has left the device? I am a total n00b to this, so please forgive me for asking such stupid questions. yoloer420 fucked around with this message at 05:15 on Apr 22, 2009 |
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Apr 22, 2009 05:09
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I don't have my licence yet (exam on November 8th) so I've just been listening. A bunch of guys on a local 2M repeater were taking about getting RF burns from home made antennas. Is this really a thing? How can this be avoided?
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Oct 21, 2021 11:27
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So I'm trying to figure out a HF setup but I live in the city and have no yard at all. What I do have is a (small) roof, but it's made of metal (colourbond). Do I have any options for a roof mounted HF antenna? I initially thought the roof would make a good ground plane, but from what I've read that's not the case and it will actually mess things up. As far as horizontal space on the roof, I've got maybe 10 metres I could use. I have to be careful to not block solar panels though. The other option I've been looking at is magloops, but it sounds like those would be best avoided if I can find any other option. Picture of roof: https://i.imgur.com/iecZJ0S.jpg yoloer420 fucked around with this message at 12:57 on Oct 27, 2021 |
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Oct 27, 2021 12:54
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Jonny 290 posted:What? that's a load of hooey. a metal roof with decent bonding between the panels is literally one of the best ground planes one can get for HF barring "120 radials buried in a cornfield"; i'd actually pay a bit of premium for a metal-roof house once I buy in a couple years. Get you a Hustler 4BTV for 40 through 10 meters, have somebody rig up a solid mount for it and maybe use some stainless sheet metal screws to bond any roof joints together well and you'll be throwing a ton of signal. Excellent! I'll check local government regulations to see how high I can go without needing approval. Thanks for the suggestions!
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Oct 28, 2021 09:19
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Pham Nuwen posted:I want to fool around with APRS using my IC-W32A. How standard are the speaker/mic ports across radio manufacturers and, more importantly, how uniform is the spacing between those two? It seems like I should be able to get something which joins the speaker & mic ports into a single TRRS 1/8" connector I can plug into my laptop, but it's hard to figure out what to get when I'm just looking at stuff on the Internet. Google tells me that you want a "k1 to 3.5mm adapter". Good luck!
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Nov 2, 2021 12:43
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I sat my foundation exam a week ago, apparently results may take another two weeks. Australia is very slow about this stuff.
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Nov 11, 2021 09:16
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I've gotten the results from my exam, I passed! It took three weeks for them to get me the results. Now the regulator in my country (Australia) has emailed me saying they'll "try" to get an invoice issued for my license in the next couple of weeks. Once they accept payment then they'll try to get around to issuing the license! But once that's all done I'll have VK6HAX.
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Nov 27, 2021 04:16
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Jonny 290 posted:lmao what the gently caress is this invoice and billing crap? Right?
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Nov 28, 2021 04:25
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drat Australia sucks for this. I'm going to skip standard and go straight to advanced I think. That way I'll only need to pay for two exams and license issuances instead of three.
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Nov 28, 2021 13:07
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America posted:I did hook the antenna up to an SDR with a HF LNA and picked up FT8 from as far away as eastern Spain, Japan, and Chile (I'm in the US southwest). We'll see what's possible with 20W. Can you tell me more about your setup? I've got a HackRF that I'd like to do HF stuff with. Most of what I've found in terms of SDRs and ham radio is just SDR guts in a traditional transceiver body. I get the advantages of that sure. For me the advantage of an SDR is messing with the software though.
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Nov 29, 2021 15:57
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I really want one of those, the 991 is massive by comparison. Sure an internal ATU is nice, but not 5KG nice. Yaesu hosed by up discontinuing it.
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Dec 23, 2021 23:43
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Crusader posted:just got this on the last iss pass:  I managed to get this with my baofeng held up to my mobile phone doing the decoding. I'm absolutely shocked it worked so well.
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Dec 30, 2021 00:59
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Helianthus Annuus posted:drat, you really just put a speaker up to a mic, and it worked? i'm also shocked! Yeah, that was the whole thing. I went outside at the time the ISS was going overhead, turned up the volume, held my phone next to the speaker and.. yeah. What surprised me even more, was I tried it without going outside (it was 44c/111f) and got this:  After that I was reading about adding a wire counterpoise to HTs and tried it. It made a small improvement so I coiled the wire around my handheld for easy storage. Immediately I started picking up signals that I couldn't before, the result is *far* better than the rat tail approach, but I can't figure out why. I've checked the AARL Antenna book, and did some googling, but I can't find anything that would explain it.   Does anyone have any idea why this works well? Repeaters that are 80KM away are now crystal clear without going outside, where before I couldn't receive them at all. I'd expect it would just induct a heap of noise into the antenna ground but.. yeah.
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Dec 30, 2021 04:02
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Even more so given that it's a coil wound around a speaker. That should be resulting in all sorts of garbage ending up on ground.
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Dec 30, 2021 11:32
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:Is there a website that shows when the iss will be over your location? I’m down to stand in my yard with my phone smashed to my baofeng I use Look4Sat or ISS Detector on Android. They're probably on iOS too. Hurry though, SSTV broadcasts stop soon!
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Dec 31, 2021 01:41
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I'm buying a 2m/70cm antenna to go on my roof. What connector type should I go with? The options are Type N and PL-259. I'm in Australia so I've got a lot of heat, dust, and sometimes rain.
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Jan 7, 2022 03:19
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Thanks, the cost difference is minimal if anything at all. I'll go Type N. Sadly I've just found out all the radio stores in my country seem to be on holiday. I'll order when they reopen.
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Jan 7, 2022 04:32
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JointHorse posted:Speaking of Baofengs, what's the latest good version to buy? Anything newer/better than UV-82, that's not a rebadged UV-5R with a fancy name? Get a UV-5R III or a BF-F8HP. As far as I know anything else (aside from dmr stuff) is just a regular UV-5R. If I'm wrong please tell me!
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Jun 7, 2022 11:54
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I've heard good things about the flagpole antennas, get one of the ATUs they suggest though, the SWR is way higher than you'd think. There is a reason they suggest fairly high end remote tuners.
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Jun 15, 2022 12:37
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Try transmitting on wspr and see if anyone picks it up.
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Oct 25, 2022 01:01
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Transmit, don't worry about receiving. You can search on https://www.wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/spotquery to see if anyone picked up your transmission. This way we can determine if your TX capability is ok or not. Achmed Jones posted:dang, i'm getting nothing. would it come through indoors with only a few feet of random wire? You'll likely get something if you let it run for a day or so. That setup isn't going to be reliable though. You're more likely to get lucky with TX.
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Oct 25, 2022 01:30
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emptyrave posted:I know nothing about electricity or amateur radio and forgot I bookmarked this thread a while ago. Are you licensed or using CB radio? What you describe absolutely exists on CB radio, if you tell us what country you're in we can likely point you to the correct frequencies/channels for road chat.
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Feb 9, 2023 08:45
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horse_ebookmarklet posted:Maybe I am back around to confused. Look at current limiting circuits. 10w is pretty low though. I'd really suggest going the solar route. Get a 100w panel or something to keep the battery charged.
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Apr 12, 2023 08:37
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Does anyone have any opensource software they'd recommend to enable me to use my rig remotely over the network? It's an ft-991, so I'd want something that can just work with serial control and an audio interface. Basically I'd like to just plug an rpi or similar into it and be able to do voice from my laptop or something.
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Oct 10, 2023 04:59
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Coxswain Balls posted:Cookware I have nothing to input in regards to your questions, but I read this article sometime ago and thought it might be useful.
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Feb 15, 2024 10:41
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Lay them out in a zig zag kinda pattern. It'll probably work. Edit: I wonder if helically wound counterpoise would work reasonably well. I feel like it should, but I'm unsure. yoloer420 fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Apr 26, 2024 |
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Apr 26, 2024 03:28
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SEKCobra posted:So I kinda wanted to give POCSAG paging another shot, but it seems that the only real way to play with it is using 9k6 radios. I tried looking around for any current radios still having packet support, but it seems they just don't exist anymore? Has that feature just died out? Packet is alive and well. The way to do it would be using direwolf or something similar and figuring out how to get a 9.6k compatible connection to your radio. With the ft-991 it involves making some custom cables. I'm not sure about other transceivers. If you just want to receive, it would be far easier to use an rtl-sdr.
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Apr 27, 2024 04:09
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