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PuTTY riot posted:thanks, ur like my e-elmer trufacts: I was my Dad's Elmer. i'm a KC4 call and he jumped in the game about 4 years later, got a KD4. TO AUDIENCE: "Elmer" is the hobby term for an experienced ham mentor that gets you into the hobby and shows you the ropes. No crazy grey cats here sorry
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Feb 25, 2014 00:25
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PuTTY riot posted:are QSL cards dead or are they still A Thing? they seem kinda cool very much still a thing. internet call databases mean its way easier to send cards out, and people are more likely to send a card if they get a card i'll see if i can dig up some that ive gotten
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Feb 25, 2014 00:57
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keep honking, i'm reloading i can type for this poo poo until the end of time. work week brings less radio fun, i am ordering a $20 SDR on thursday though
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Feb 25, 2014 15:11
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I possess no fewer than three radio receivers that can receive the AMPS cellular band too bad analog's dead used to listen to people's calls down in hot springs in like 2000. BORING. SO loving BORING. "what do you want for dinner?" "i dunno. what are you feeling like" forever
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Feb 25, 2014 15:32
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Shaggar posted:hey jonny. if i use tomato on my routers @ home and want to bridge them and set them 2 a non-us zone that allows like channel 14 on 2.4ghz how much trouble will that get me in and is it far enough away from normal wifi to get away from all the other aps on 2.4ghz? set them to japan, you should get channel 14, nobody cares, go fuckin hog wild 14 is far enough from 11 that it should be pretty rock solid
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Feb 25, 2014 16:29
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You'd take out a literal entire band if you operated on lower freqs. like, the 2 meter band, most popular for local comms, is only 4 MHz wide. wifi signal is like 20, 40 MHz. the most likely candidate for best band would be on the 13cm band, which is right below the wifi band. You could retune (or hell maybe even reprogram if it's SDR) an AP to this, in 90% of the country nobody would ever notice because hams are not on that band. And it's not used for satellites right now, which means the only dudes on it are going to be microwave sperglords talking to each other from different mountaintops. They'd get _hella_ pissed and would be very able to track you down because their antennas are so directional, but really, its not an issue. i dont want to come across as seeming that i'm advocating pirate activity, im just laying down the truths. i respect (only the) amateur radio division of the FCC, and appreciate the fact that I have such a nice license to play with my beloved radio toys. That being said, some of the laws are stupid and pointless
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Feb 25, 2014 16:41
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Way fewer than you think. The whole point of ham radio is to talk to other people. now if you ask 'engineers', i have some different and far more depressing data for you
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Feb 25, 2014 17:03
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The only easier federal exam i have ever seen is the certification to handle R12 refrigerant and it's an online test and you pay $20 once and can retake for free and they give you the answer key
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Feb 25, 2014 17:08
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Unlicensed up to certain power levels. From what I understand, with a few exceptions the rule is 30 dBm (decibels relative to one milliwatt) effective radiated power, with a 3:1 antenna to radio gain waiver. This is comparable to a perfect (theoretical) antenna transmitting one watt. The 3:1 rule means: If you reduce your output power by 1 dB you can increase your antenna gain by 3 dB. This means that if you backed your power down to 20 dBm (100 mW output), you could put a 30 dB gain antenna on it (this would be either a long yagi or a medium sized dish), and have effective 50 dBm power (equivalent to 100 watts through that same imaginary perfect antenna) - albeit in a very concentrated, focused beam just a couple of degrees wide. think fixed point to point
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Feb 25, 2014 17:26
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that's just pure intermodulation/overload. The downside of the whizbang $50 chinese radios is that they have no filtering on the front end. it's just a fact of life at that cost point. This is a big reason why people like me troll ebay for 30 year old icom radios and poo poo - back in the day, these things were built like brick shithouses because the cops, the FD, EVERYBODY was on the 150-174 MHz band in the 70s and 80s, and you quite simply had to filter the gently caress out of the signals otherwise the cop repeater would overload your ham rig 24/7, even though you weren't tuned to it. Now, the VHF bands are quieter so you can get away with less front end filtering, which lets you sell a dual band radio for 50 bucks
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Feb 25, 2014 17:59
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honestly this poo poo is WAY easier to troubleshoot and debug than printed circuit boards i love point to point stuff
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Feb 25, 2014 21:08
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dead bug is still a valid construction method for RF circuits that's a completely functional 20 meter (14 mhz) CW transciever (transmitter and receiver) that somebody just loving built out of parts and pieces of circuit board. even the chassis is made of pieces of circuit board
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Feb 25, 2014 21:10
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oh my god that kenwood setup oh my godddddddddddddddddddddddd pops has excellent taste across the board. wow wow wow
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Feb 25, 2014 21:19
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homebrew is awesome and if I can finish unwinding this spare power transformer I found, we're going to build a crystal radio in this thread over the next week or so as I have time I have personally only homebrewed simple stuff like audio interfaces and preamps, but given some parts/test equipment and the ability to design and build myself, i could deffo crank something nice out. its just a matter of subdividing your tasks and building things up as subassemblies/modules the test equipment is far more important than the parts. you can't desolder oscilloscopes from dead transistor radios and old power supplies
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Feb 25, 2014 23:23
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maniacdevnull posted:40% solder by volume. cmon son. poo poo i wish that's actually really clean
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Feb 26, 2014 03:51
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Crankit posted:incidentally that's manhattan construction, not dead bug. <--shame you're correct though  i love the angry greybeard thread
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Feb 26, 2014 15:23
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yeah, that doesn't mean they're actually used though. We may have 28 mhz of shortwave bands allocated all told, but there are only like four or five domestic shortwave stations and the only non-religious one, Voice of America, isn't allowed to target US citizens. It's meant for international listeners only. This rule is stupid and backwards.
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Feb 26, 2014 15:42
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this is probably a better bet. If you want to test to make sure it can at least display a trace, make a little 1/8" plug cable with just stripped wire ends and bring it when you go look, then play some music through your phone through the cable and hit the bare wire with a probe (dont forget to hook up ground too), you should see the music bumpin' on the scope if they don't have a probe and claim it works, tell em to kick rocks
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Feb 26, 2014 19:35
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spankmeister posted:today i decoded some p2000 emergency services pager signals using my RTLSDR dongle and some software: super hot, nice. feel free to kick deetz on the software down, I don't know poo poo about the rtlsdr stuff yet and am ordering a dongle tomorrow
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Feb 26, 2014 19:53
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spankmeister posted:ok so i got a DVB-T dongle with the RTL2832U and a RT820 tuner chip. the 820 has a bit less range on the high end than the E4000 (1800 ish vs 2200 is) but the E4000 has a gap around 1.2Ghz or so? I'm not 100% on these numbers but ballpark. Very informative! We should experiment with the other modulations because a discriminator tap is just a wider signal without any lowpass filtering, i'd imagine we can figure it out. super excited to get that thing now
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Feb 26, 2014 20:15
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i should take some pics of the bmw at night now. inside is basically an airplane cockpit now thinking of desoldering the blue LEDs in my uniden scanner and green ones in my CB and replacing with amber so everything matches (the icom has switchable backlight color so its good)
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Feb 26, 2014 22:16
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Jimmy Carter posted:My school was near the ARRL HQ and I got to swing by and work W1AW a bunch. This year marks 100 years since the ARRL's creation, and to celebrate they worked out a special deal with the FCC - over this year, they are allowing select people all around the country use the W1AW call to make contacts. Last Saturday, I spoke to a fella operating W1AW/8, gave me a good report and now I"m in a log book for all time AND if you watched that satellite video, you heard another station operating W1AW trying to make contacts on the satellite. That call is going to be all over the airwaves for 2014, it's really cool.On the /8 thing, the digit is your 'call district'. These are split up by region pretty much - here is the full chart. I have a "4-land" call, which I got in North Carolina - 4 is issued to most southeast states. Arkansas is a 5-land call, so when I operate on HF, I call "this is XX4XXX slash five" to let people know that I'm not really operating in 4 land. This is important because a lot of people have goals of "Worked All States" awards and such, and it's just polite to let them know up front. Colorado is a 0-land district, so when I move I'll call out "slash zero". I'll never change my callsign or get another new one voluntarily. It's awful to send in CW, difficult to understand over voice so I always have to use phonetics, but it's mine. Jonny 290 fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Feb 27, 2014 |
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Feb 27, 2014 15:16
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teledildonics posted:apparently as of july of last year, the rule against VOA broadcasting to american listeners was ended. you can pick it up on shortwave and its internet stream. holy cow that owns! update: bought an sdr stick for 18 bucks. woop
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Feb 27, 2014 15:35
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cause goons. if we get to the point where some of us might get on the radio and talk, i'll pass it around no reason to actively invite the death threats and pizza orders right now
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Feb 27, 2014 16:19
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PICS INC. Let's design an antenna. Since people are getting started here, we have decided to build a simple 2-meter (144 MHz band) vertical antenna that would be suitable for putting up on a pole, in your attic, whatever. We'll do a simple focus on trying to optimize the Standing Wave Ratio (SWR) which indicates how tuned the antenna is to the feedline and radio. 50 ohms is a perfect 1:1 match. We'll shoot for 1.5 or lower across the band. DANGER WILL ROBINSON, HAM RADIO SOFTWARE ON THE HORIZON. PREPARING FOR BAD USER INTERFACE....... Welcome to MMANA-GAL, written by an insane japanese ham. It's one of my tools for basic design and optimization.  Let's add a wire. We'll start with a 1/4 wavelength wire and feed it at the bottom. The "w1b" signifies the feedpoint at bottom left.  Aww, it's so cute.  Let's click that "Calculate" tab. Only pay attention to the top line for now, I was playing with other antennas - MMANA fills this newest-at-top. Looks like our antenna, when placed on the ground and fed against it, has about 1.4 SWR. Hey, not bad! We wouldn't hear much on a VHF antenna sitting on the ground, though.  After we click "Plots", MMANA will show us the projected radiation patterns. Pretty much by the book so far.  The SWR tab shows that we have decent, but rising SWR, and our antenna is possibly too long (if it's too long it'll be a better match at lower freqs, opposite for too short)  Let's get this thing off the ground! Add 5 meters of height and OH GOD WHAT THE gently caress JUST HAPPEN  We lifted it off the ground, and MMANA keeps track of all the electrical connections. By raising the antenna, we disconnected it from its ground plane. See how important the ground plane is? Let's add a ground plane. Remember that a decent ground plane can be made by four 1/4 wave wires sticking out horizontally.  More interesting looking now.  You might have seen that "Optimize" button. This is where the magic happens. Here you can enter parameters to wiggle, criteria to wiggle them by, and metrics to judge the performance of the antenna, which you can individually weight. What i'm doing here is wiggling the length of the vertical element (wire 1). Then, because the radials should match the element at this point, we 'bind' the radial lengths to the element length (the 'Associated' column). Now the program will wiggle all five elements' lengths in 5mm increments, measuring the SWR at each iteration. If it lengthens and the SWR goes up, it goes back and shortens.   Hey, better match now! You see the bottom line (right after we added the wires) and the top line (after we optimized). That SWR is still a little high, though. What else can we do to tune this? Bend those radials! As your ground radials get bent down, your impedance rises - and that's just what we need here. Let's go back and work that Optimize tab some. We'll set it up to wiggle the vertical element length, as before, but this time we're going to change the zenith angle (vertical tilt) of the radials, pivoting them around their start point (the feedpoint) between 90 degrees and 180 - straight out to straight down. START!  Holy crap, that worked perfectly! Look at the SWR below. Almost a perfect 1:1 match.  What's it look like now?  Looks like MMANA bent them down right around 35 degrees to get that match. Easy to reproduce on the real antenna. And here's the SWR curve if we go back to Plots, a very well-tuned antenna that will give us less than 1.5:1 SWR (this is our general benchmark for usability) across the entirety of the 2 meter band. 
Jonny 290 fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Feb 27, 2014 |
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Feb 27, 2014 17:02
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Oh and the antenna I was playing with before I did that post was a parasitic Lindenblad antenna that I'm thinking of building up this weekend, so I have a fresh 70cm satellite antenna - my Yagi got hosed by an ice storm
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Feb 27, 2014 17:10
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:do any of you yoshams keep bigass batteries or a generator so you can keep communicating in the event of natural disaster or nuclear war I have a couple of 7amp-hour gel cell UPS batteries that I can run my rigs off of for an hour or three, but no serious lead-acid action. If I wasn't moving soon I'd grab a couple of deep cycle batteries from the local shop, which have about 110 amp-hours or so. They're like 70 lbs each though so I'm holding off. Plus, most of my radios at this point either are already in, or can be hooked up to, one of my cars, so I sort of have two v8 and a straight 6 generator at my disposal at all times. Not really efficient, but would keep me on the air.
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Feb 27, 2014 17:28
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PuTTY riot posted:after 9-11 everyone was supposed to be interop and this is why the DHS kind of loving hates podunk racist localtowns saying HEY WE CAN CONSPIRE TO PULL OVER MEXICANS WITH IMPUNITY NOW CAUSE ENCRYPTION. terrar money paid for those fancy rear end new digital radios and interoperability was the condition.
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Feb 27, 2014 17:41
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spankmeister posted:i probably ordered a fake because it was like $6 but oh well. No, that's the real one, hahah. Nice haul! Should make for a bunch of fun Bloody posted:i dont understand the basic premise of wanting to talk to ham users if nobody but old men get their ham license, nobody but old men will be on the air I have been a big amateur radio community hater over the past several years but this thread has proven to me that young people still give a gently caress about this, i have changed my mind thanks guys 
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Feb 27, 2014 22:28
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you can talk about whatever you want as long as you're not committing crimes or uttering profanity. talk about beer, talk about cars, talk about gardening. Make some friends that have shared interests, get some licenses, get on the radio and start runnin your mouth. it's easy There are contexts in which yes, you're right, the entirety of communications is "Here's my call, I received your call, here's your signal report, next", but contest operators like that are only active now and then and easy to avoid
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Feb 27, 2014 22:52
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That's not a frequency limitation or anything by the way, it's just that air traffic still uses AM modulation and the little chinarigs only demodulate FM.
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Feb 27, 2014 23:19
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Fax Sender posted:I'm more into listening to things than talking This is a big part of it too. You can have a shitload of fun listening and learning and building, and if you want to get into transmitting and actually getting your voice out there, you can compartmentalize that and do it on the side. there are more engineering challenges with transmitting than receiving - power handling, interference to your neighbor's TV, power supply - so many times throughout the years I have been receive-only and been completely fulfilled in the hobby. And it's true that you don't need your license to listen, but it comes in as a huge advantage in two ways: -Hams give other hams more respect than unlicensed people, so they will be more forthcoming with help and info -Amateur radio licenses grant you waivers to operate otherwise prohibited radios in many states. If you have a ham license, it is completely normal that you have a scanner in your car. If you don't, they're going to crawl up your rear end WHY DO YOU HAVE THIS. My license rides in my wallet and I've never had anybody question my radio activities, but if they do I have the backing of state law
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Feb 28, 2014 00:34
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0efTTWMl3v0
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Feb 28, 2014 01:35
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qrz.com is a valuable resource, they have practice tests there as well let me see if i can find some guides and such. For radios if you're in the US, start out with as much Baofeng on Amazon Prime as you can afford. The GT-3 is pretty popular right now, but it's like 65 or 70 bucks which approaches the price of an eBay I/Y/K* handheld and the UV-5RA+ seems popular so I say go for that instead. Get the USB cable, I hear they're a bitch to program through the keypad but I don't know personally. For antennas I believe the Nagoya 770 or 771, also on Amazon, are really popular, and are super-recommended as the stock antenna is poo poo. Wouxun handhelds are about in the middle of the price vs quality continuum versus the I/Y/K's and the Baofengs. Don't know much about them. *Icom/Yaesu/Kenwood, the big three Japanese amateur radio manufacturers. Generally the benchmark for quality mass-produced radios. Most finicky hams pick high end radios of these brands. They're all roughly equal and pretty much a Chevy/Ford/Dodge thing. I'm an Icom guy. E: as far as SDR goes, I just ordered one of these today. Order any dongle with a similar trip and i'll LP us through getting it set up. Jonny 290 fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Feb 28, 2014 |
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Feb 28, 2014 03:30
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starsoldier posted:i got a technician license in 2005 and upgraded to general in 2010. i found out later my deceased grandfather was really into amateur radio and i picked up one of his old heathkit receivers from the basement that i played with with a random wire antenna. i've basically only hosed around on 2m and 70cm. i got a raspberry pi over christmas so i made a little aprs digipeater/i-gate at my parents house which is in bumfuck nowhere so i only picked up packets from other digipeaters which was kinda boring. rpi aprs is pretty easy to set up though, you just need a usb sound card and interface to the radio and soundmodem plus some aprs software like aprx will do the rest. setting up something to do audio isolation and ptt was literally my first soldering experience and it worked out fine. i even used the interface to make a echolink node just to see if it worked. i really want get some hf going but i'm in college in a lovely apartment so i have limited financial means and space to set up a radio and antenna. so far i have an icom 2100 and a chinese baofeng uv-b5 welcome and i hope you are enjoying the thread I didn't have enough scratch to get an HF radio going for years and years, I definitely feel you. It stung so bad that the first purchase I made after my first real long adult relationship fell apart was my Icom 735. I've been thinking about taking my old Alinco 2m radio and putting APRS on it, i'd like to know more about the cheap and easy APRS setup for sure!
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Feb 28, 2014 15:13
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Wiggly Wayne DDS posted:i have a bunch of rtlsdr gear kicking around here from a project last year, think i'll get it set back up after this cool thread buy an upconverter, check out the HF side. there's lots of SSB there so SDR is nice, and plenty ham/digital/whatever stuff to tune in.
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Mar 1, 2014 01:45
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Building that Lindenblad now, PVC shavings and solder blobs are everywhere
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Mar 1, 2014 18:11
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window shopping - an Icom R9000 receiver has gone on ebay, it is not the best receiver ever made, but it is up there, and I have wanted to own one for twenty years. cool thing about this listing is that the seller obviously knows this radio inside and out http://www.ebay.com/itm/Icom-IC-R90...S:B:SHOP:US:101
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Mar 2, 2014 16:46
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"wahh everythings going digital" so what? go digital. ISS is going to fire up a DTV transmitter and if you're set up for it you'll be able to get high res video from it: quote:Ham Video Commissioning now scheduled
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Mar 2, 2014 17:12
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Honestly i'm not sure and I didn't know hams were tinkering with DTV (we have a long long history of analog TV operation, there are even repeaters) intrigued now, good thing to study for an icy sunday where I CAN'T GO OUT AND PLAY WITH THE NEW ANTENNA I BUILT YESTERDAY
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Mar 2, 2014 18:41
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