Any Amateur Radio operators here?

Rob 80386 said:
I've done my assessment on my station, it's more than compliant at full power 100W barefoot, even without line losses taken into account, at the worst all I would have to do is move my antenna to make it compliant, but fortunately I don't have to. :)
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I don't think it's as bad as people think, and most of us have our antennas up at a height far enough away anyway. My inverted V for portable may be a bit tricky though...
 
Jelster said:
I don't think it's as bad as people think, and most of us have our antennas up at a height far enough away anyway. My inverted V for portable may be a bit tricky though...
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It will be okay if you operate QRP when portable, less than 10W, my baofengs are compliant by design, if I were to get a Yaesu 817/818 and use a mag loop or long wire, operating on batteries I think it's only 6W anyway, compliant by design.
 
Rob 80386 said:
It will be okay if you operate QRP when portable, less than 10W, my baofengs are compliant by design, if I were to get a Yaesu 817/818 and use a mag loop or long wire, operating on batteries I think it's only 6W anyway, compliant by design.
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But I go portable with around 50 watts and the ends of the inverted V are just 1m off of the ground. Officially I will need to cordon off the area around the antenna; just as well as I like going where there are not too many walkers.
 
Jelster said:
But I go portable with around 50 watts and the ends of the inverted V are just 1m off of the ground. Officially I will need to cordon off the area around the antenna; just as well as I like going where there are not too many walkers.
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True, keeping to an area with no people will work, just like when I fly my models, I always go to an area thats clear of everyone :)
 
When I used HF ( only for a short time) I lived in a rented house so could not put up anything permanent up, I got around this by driving a copper pipe into the ground attaching a dipole centre to it then The having a quarter wave for each band as I remember 80/40/20/15/ going around the low fence with wooden separators. It worked a treat and needed no tuner. This of course could not be used as naibours could stand right by it within inches. I'm in the process of moving to a house with a really small garden and this got me thinking how would I do it there ? The only multi band no tuner antenna I could come up with was a dipole for each band feed in the centre, with one leg of the dipoles hanging down vertically and the other going down the garden in this config I think I would be able to do 40 meters and up. Then I thought this may still run into problems as the centre will still be very near the next doors house and I'm guessing QRP would be the only way. I'm still trying to think of a cheap /discrete no tuner antenna that I could make work, really I would be most interested in 80/40 meters inter G.
All this is theoretical as one I'm not quite there with the house move ( still have my fingers crossed) and I don't have any HF gear !
 
Brad, have a look at Tim, G5TM on Youtube. He has a small garden and has managed to fit in a doublet which has legs running around all of his garden. The other option is to do the same as me which is to run a long wire. Mine starts at the gable end (which faces the back garden) goes off to one side where it's supported by an old telescopic fibreglass fishing pole at around 6m, into the top of a tree at the bottom of the garden (It's next doors tree but has a lot hanging over my side of the fence); it then runs at 90 degrees along the back hedge at about 3m.

Your other option is of course a vertical, but these generally need a number of counterpoise radials in the ground.
 
Back in the early 80s the CB community was quite strong around Teesside, this was as legal FM sets were coming in but I had a Cobra 148 before that with various mods.
Though illegal to use the AM/SSB side was quite active and it was often possible to speak to the same people in Southern Europe on a daily basis.
One chap in Marseilles was such a regular contact my French improved no end. Eventually he visited us here with family.
In the afternoon evening you could often listen to Brazil and the USA but getting back to those was much harder though not impossible even on a mobile set up.
I wonder if anyone else remembers BravoAlpha 06 and 07 booming out from an elevated parking spot near Bishop Auckland almost every weekend.
Very rarely you could even pick up truckers talking in Australia with long path propagation.
They were probably using extra power but when conditions were perfect by no means essential especially within Europe..
 
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I can remember those days 4wd, I had a mate who lived about two miles from me and on the Standard AM channels sometimes we couldn't hear each other because of the strength of mainly the Italian stations ( I lived in Malta at one point and all the TV stations were very dodgy Itallian stations ! ) I worked all over Europe, America north and south and Australia.If you wanted to chat to locals in daylight it was nearly impossible ,you had to wait till the sun went down which was great as a lot of people couldn't operate until the Tele went off.

Good news on the 2 meter front , I downloaded a manual for my radio ( it's been a long time) reset it to factory settings then went through setting it up for 12.5khz. Then I found a very strong repeater on one of the split frequencies I wasn't hearing before, It announced it's self very nicely in voice and told me the ctcss tone that was needed and it's id (GB3BM) Of I went and was chatting to the repeater keeper for a while, with this I found where it was and all I can say is that's it's no surprise it was so strong as I can see it from my house ! The last time I heard anything of this repeater was when it was closed down by abuse from the now famous Laughing Policeman.http://www.laughingpoliceman.com/ I had to drive to where I am moving to to take some measurements of the house ( approx 25 Mile by road) and I can hear the repeater very strongly all the way (great for the commute)

Funnily enough Steve I had been looking at some of G5TM's YouTube content this morning. I only have a receiver for HF at the moment so I'll probably use a long wire feed at ground level in a very bent, zig zaggy, Vertical and horizontal configuration and I'll cobble something together as a tuner. I may even build a little QRP CW TX and do some machine morse. That and a million other things I intend to do when I move. As it's a new house and new naibours I'll have to keep it fairly low key. I'm tolerated here with my garden air gunning, dogs, and general weird ways. :):):). I like the idea of being covert anyway it adds another challenge. I've never used a longwire at height Steve how are you feeding/ earthing it ?
 
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My roots are in 11 metres. I had a Cobra 148 as well, with a Zetagi 100 amp and a Shakespeare "Super Big Stick", along with a Moonraker 6 on the car (which had a 2nd battery in the boot on a charging circuit. I had various calls during those days, but the best moment was when I worked my friend Mario, who moved from Kent to Calgary about 8 months previously. We were both part of a club called International Friendship, and we used 26.600, which you couldn't reach on a standard rig, even with low bands, you had to have the 10Kc shift, or use modified ham equipment. I also had an FT107 as well...
 
Using my HF RX and a super naff antenna this Sunday I could hear three nets with plenty of users on the Now legal 11m SSB freqs Steve it worth a listen to !
 
BADGER.BRAD said:
Using my HF RX and a super naff antenna this Sunday I could hear three nets with plenty of users on the Now legal 11m SSB freqs Steve it worth a listen to !
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27.500 I think they tend to use don't they? I never hear anyone on 11m except for one of the local farms. He's got a silver rod on top of a barn, which is on a hill, and they have a couple antennas on tractors. Could probably DX from that location!
 
27.555 Is the illegal calling frequency, but there are restricted legally to the mid band ie: the old AM FCC channels AM/FM/SSB
 
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I have just today received a little dual band 2/70 Boafeng handheld £19 delivered, It really does works a treat although I haven't worked out how to program to memory ( the instructions are naff) How do they do that for £19 ? It would have been hundreds 15 years ago !
 
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BADGER.BRAD said:
I have just today received a little dual band 2/70 Boafeng handheld £19 delivered, It really does works a treat although I haven't worked out how to program to memory ( the instructions are naff) How do they do that for £19 ? It would have been hundreds 15 years ago !
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I've got a CSV file for all my local repeaters. Happily email it to you if it helps you get to grips with programming it. Don't buy a programming cable off of Amazon, most of them are crap - get one from Moonraker. Then download a copy of "Chirp" to programme it.
 
Thanks for your offer Steve but I should be o.k, There are two repeaters within site of my house at the moment both at the same location ( Turners Hill , the highest spot in the Midlands) one on 2 and one on 70 which are serving me well I am due to move house soon so will have to work out which repeaters I can use from there and reprogram anyway. I have an antenna connector/adapter and am waiting for a Microphone to come as I intend to use the radio as a base station. When I move I'm going to have to build an antenna which is covert and dual band to suit the property and need some slim flexible coax cable ( I only have RG213 which is like trying to bend steel rod !) I've been watching 500 KHZ videos and really fancy a go at that, has anyone played on 500 KHZ or even the Dreamers band 9KHZ ?
 
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Never played with anything below 80m. Top band has always been all noise and no voices for me, wherever I've lived, and I've never had any space for an antenna that will work even lower!

For coax, I would suggest the 7mm "Mini 8" stuff. Losses are similar to RG213, but it bends like RG58.
 
Today I recorded my 100th DXCC entity on FT8, which was China. I was -23db on 10w on my L shaped long wire.

Feeling quite pleased with myself as I don't really sit in the shack and give the radio serious attention. If I'm doing something on my Mac (like now) I spin up the old Windoze box and play a little. The only time I give the radio any serious attention is if I wake up early at the weekend and do some SSB before the Mrs gets up.
 
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