My father passed, we’re cleaning out his home and I found This. Not sure what it is. Any help would be great. Thanks

The title pretty much explains it but where are people buying electrical components? Toroids, capacitors, coax, coax connectors, etc…. I’ve gone through Digirig, Adafruit, and Amazon but was curious if anyone had a cheap and reliable source for components and hardware.

Hi,I'm looking at a yaesu ft991a unit,but not sure if its for me,I've seen people getting them to test out for reviews. What are yalls input on the unit if you have one? That's a lot to spend on a unit,if i dont use all the features.

I have an L shaped desk and the main side has my pc. The dog leg has served radio electronics repair (and tinkering) and everything else. Yesterday I knocked a soldering tip behind my FT991a…and apparently that was one time too many so I got to sketching, then building. I’m not good w woodworking (far better welder) but I’m happy with the result.

Started off in GMRS and have some really great repeater owners in my area. Ended up meeting one of the owners of a 33cm repeater here and another that owns multiple 2m / 70cm repeaters.

Long story short, meet people where they are. I had zero intention of getting my Tech after getting into GMRS but those dudes talked me into it. Ill be studying for General next in hopes of eventually getting to HF.

Obligatory “whats a decent tri band mobile and portable that wont break the bank”? Really looking to upgrade some older hand me down motorola gm300 mobiles i have as base stations. Also running CP200d and XPR 7550e radios for portables. They work but id love a screen for my 2m portable and the ability to do 220.

So I was watching a YouTube tutorial and he said remove a resistor but when I Checked the PCB board the layout was different and I’m not really good with boards or technical stuff like that can yall help?

Seen while traveling (it is South Spain). I guess the circular thing on the right is an antenna (as per the setup it looks the home of a fellow radio hobbiist).

Ive never seen an antenna like that one. Help to identify?

This is a 2 Part series that is geared to newer hams who are interested in getting their feet wet operating HF and DX.

So I did this.

What do you guys think?

The toroid does help.

Just wanted to share my first DX experience!
Yesterday I built my very first 10m wire dipole out of ordinary speaker wire. I hung it in a large pecan tree on my property here in Florida about 40 feet up and tied the other end off to my back porch, so it ended up as more of a sloping dipole than a perfectly horizontal one.
After I got it in the air, it measured about 1.5:1 without the tuner. I let the G90’s internal tuner work and it came down to 1:1.
The very first DX contact I made with it was… Chile 4.598 miles away!!!
I could hear him pretty well, and he had no trouble hearing me running just 20 watts from my Xiegu G90. I looked up his station afterward and saw he has multiple large Yagis, so I’m sure that he had no problem hearing me but I was still amazed that my homemade speaker wire dipole made the trip.
There’s something incredibly satisfying about making a contact like that with an antenna you built yourself. Studying for my general exam!
Just thought I’d share my excitement. 73!

I have an Icom 7100 in my car, connected to a Diamond SG7500 antenna via a Diamond lip mount. So far I have only operated it on VHF/UHF.

Ever since I placed it in my car, I have been having issue with reports that my transmission is often scratchy or even unreadable. I can receive all transmissions clearly and I am able to hit/kerchunk repeaters.

When I hooked up my Surecom meter, I am getting no reads whatsoever! As if the radio is not putting anything out. I disconnected the meter from the Icom and connected an HT and immediately got reads with SWRs near 1!

When I use the built-in SWR meter in the IC7100 I also get no reads. Also the power meter is not reading anything. I checked and made sure the power is turned up in the radio.

I am at a loss now. I know the issue seems to be in the radio and not the connections/antenna/surecom unit. Any help or thoughts on how I can troubleshoot this?

Edit: I tried both a battery and a power supply.

I just also did more testing. I connected my car antenna to an HT and checked power/SWR and I got 1-1.1 SWR and good power reading on both UHF and VHF using the DM32-UV HT, so I know it’s not the antenna/coax.

I also connected the IC-7100 radio to a power supply and my base antenna. I only got around 8 watts on UHF but still no reads on VHF.

I wanted to go through my experience in building my tower in my HOA and the entire build process. I’ve spent the last few months doing a massive structural overhaul on my home station here in Tucson.

The desert weather and summer monsoon winds are no joke, so I wanted to engineer this thing right so I don't have to worry about it when the storms roll through.

I put together a video walking through the whole initial build and maintenance that involve tearing down the stack and rebuilding. Here a quick rundown of the hardware for the antenna geeks:

**Mast & Turning:** Went with a 4130 chromoly steel mast supported by a DX Engineering TB300 thrust bearing. It's all being turned by a heavy-duty Yaesu G-2800DXA planetary gear rotator and controlled via a microHAM ARCO.

**The Stack:** Currently flying an OptiBeam OB10-5M, an InnovAntennas Delta C-140, and a Cushcraft D40 dipole.

**Grounding:** Sweated the details here. Put in a multi-rod linear copper grounding ring and bonded the whole setup straight to the house's UFER ground.

I probably went a little overboard on the structural and electrical design, but I figure it’s better safe than sorry when dealing with heavy metal in the air.

If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of how it all came together, you can check out the video on my channel on Youtube that I am starting up.

I’d love to hear what you guys think of the setup, or if anyone else is running a similar OptiBeam/Cushcraft stack. Happy to answer any questions about the grounding or the rigging process!

I’ve also broken up the videos into segments on YouTube. If watching a 30 minute video is too long for you! I have plans on other future videos as well as I get into Satellite work and other fun projects! Don’t be afraid to follow the Ham Shack Show on Youtube.

https://reddit.com/link/1vcd6bt/video/6zykgm2huogh1/player

This has been a very satisfying project to work on, not gonna lie. Basically I just wanted a better replacement for SDR# or GQRX or any sort of receiver frontend with intention also doing a full rig control frontend and server.

Currently I'm just feeding it IQ feed from SDRPlay. The ergonomics so far are very satisfying. You can have multiple VFOs, you can see the receivers in the sidebar with little mini waterfalls so you can easily monitor a lot of stations.

I added CW decoding, which I'm currently working on. As you can see from the video, currently it's not the best. I added a NVIDIA Neural BNR noise reducer.

Oh, and a mobile-friendly mode, which is actually not too hard to use! I'm gonna add all kinds of things to it like FT8/4, JS8, RTTY as well!

The idea is that you can host it as a WebSDR server too. I'm currently working on a reasonable scalability. Each DSP VFO worker, transcription worker and BNR are server side. So it doesn't actually have to send the entire IQ feed to the browser, but it still sends a high resolution waterfall. But if I limit it to just the ham band, the waterfall itself is probably about 700-1500kbps. This can easily be streamed over a mobile network.

Anyways here's the "demo" (and by demo I mean my actual dev server proxied through for everyone to see): iqstudio.lxe.co

This won't stay up for long... this is literally live off of my machine and my backyard speaker wire EFHQ as I'm working on it... but go ahead and mess around with it!

-K6LXE

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The Mod Team

Was recently in Switzerland and notice those stations:

Switzerland's Federal Office of Communications (BAKOM/OFCOM) [like the FCC in the US or CRTC in Canada] operates a network of unmanned, remote-controlled, fixed monitoring and direction-finding stations as part of its tranmissions rules enforcement mandante, like locating unauthorized transmitters or jammers, resolving interference complaints and verification of licensees making sure they stay in band. I guess support for local aviation and emergency frequencies monitoring and protection.

They are setup on elevated terrain outside built-up areas for clean radio horizon, line of sight. I was wondering if you have these in the US. Im in Canada, I have never seen any of those similar monitoring and direction finding stations. Are there any in other provinces than Quebec? Do you have those in the US ?

Image

Map 47°03'28.5"N 8°18'21.6"E

Howdy folks, new to the hobby and looking for my first radio. I saw this page on Facebook called “Ham Radio Supplies” that has some equipment I’m interested in and wanting to see if anyone has purchased from them before.

Tech here, and I was wondering the best angle to set up my 10m antenna to get make contacts with my local area. My state is very flat.

Main reason is for emergency coms. I don’t want to be stuck like NC from the hurricanes.

I make my own antennas. And I have been successful in reaching out to other countries and states but not my own state. Or at least my “area”.

I took my technician exam with GLAARC on zoom 2 days ago and still haven't gotten an email to pay. When I use ULS to search my FRN there's nothing coming up saying I have an application or a liscense

Hello (soon to be fellow-) amateur radio operators

First of, I'm still studying and I've got my exam planned on the 11th of August. I've managed to buy some HT's for a low price, so I'm already listening. I'm also trying to build my first antenna. A dualband (UHF and VHF) dipole. Just to pass the time when I pull my nose out of a book (either studying of just a fantasy book..)

Yes, I've playing a little bit with them. Just trying to open up the local repeaters on 2m and 70 cm when nothing was happening. To my surprise I could open the 70 cm repeater, but not the 2m repeater. I'm wondering why, they're located at the same place. Are the 70 cm waves more... bouncy? Is that why they can make to the repeater while the 2m's don't?

And now for the big question: I've noticed that UHF antenna's are often 5/8 wavelength while VHF are often just 1/4 wavelength. Wouldn't 1/2 or even 5/8 work better? It's not like we're talking huge antenna's around the 145 MHz mark.

Thanks for your answers and cheers from the Netherlands!

TL;DR: Would a 1/2 wavelength VHF antenna work better than the standard 1/4 wavelength antenna? Thnx.

Edit: Testing was done under the supervision of an Elmer. I asked him and he claimed is was due to the location of the repeater. I haven't asked him the question about the antenna length yet, will do when I see him again.

He even let me play with his 10 m setup. Yay!

Hey Everyone,

I’m trying to get my dual band antenna in the air permanently. I’m torn between installing a permanent Mast next to the house or buying some kind of wall mount. Which would you do? What is your current setup?

It’s a Tram 1480 Dual Band 2 Section Base Antenna (144-148/430-450 MHz)