Of course. It is the aspect which puzzles me, though. I remember once hearing someone proudly telling his contact (I think on 2m) that he had 'made up a cable' (i.e. soldered connectors on the end). I was tempted to butt in and tell them that I had made the receiver, converter, transmitter, PSU and all the cables too. I decided that would sound too much like bragging so I kept silent.bear said:
no code not necessarily just an applicance operator
i am a no code tech and designed and built my own antennas (i mainly operated on all the amateur satellites (at least until they all died)) rotor controller, amplifier and power amp. I also developed my own software to predict satellite passes, common viewing geometry and log my constacts. I still don't know the morse code, i appreciate where it is useful, missed a few contacts, but was never successful in learning it (tried all the various classes....). my elmer was really good he could carry on a conversation with me and listen to code in the background but i just did not have whatever was required to deal with morse code.
I made several friends in europe and would have long conversations with them. One person i met told me 'his government would not let him leave his city', we used to send xmas cards to each other.
just my 2 cents.
i am a no code tech and designed and built my own antennas (i mainly operated on all the amateur satellites (at least until they all died)) rotor controller, amplifier and power amp. I also developed my own software to predict satellite passes, common viewing geometry and log my constacts. I still don't know the morse code, i appreciate where it is useful, missed a few contacts, but was never successful in learning it (tried all the various classes....). my elmer was really good he could carry on a conversation with me and listen to code in the background but i just did not have whatever was required to deal with morse code.
I made several friends in europe and would have long conversations with them. One person i met told me 'his government would not let him leave his city', we used to send xmas cards to each other.
just my 2 cents.
In the RF world it's just like the audio world. Have we not seen threads here where someone is proud of the new interconnects or power cord that they just "designed"? We all had to start somewhere. My lifelong audio adventure began when I stripped a guitar cord and twisted its wires to the tone arm wires in an old Magnavox HiFi. I had "built" my first guitar amp at age 8 or so.
I am a no code extra. I used to make transceivers for UHF, EME, and other speciallized modes. I had designed and built my own HF SSB HF rig from parts I acquired when Pearce Simpson folded.
For those who don't know, they made CB sets. Their depot in Miami was mostly a distribution center for Japanese made radios with repair capability. For some reason there was a small room with some nice equipment and a good stash of parts that didn't fit their radios. High quality crystal filters and VHF transistors....SWEEP TUBES and 600 volt dynamotors (I wonder what they were making?).
I had a home made radio feeding a home made antenna on HF, An ATV setup on 432 and 902, a 902 FM repeater, and some other UHF experiments including 902 EME through a 12 foot TV dish.
After having the 12 foot dish in the yard for 15 years the city code enforcement nazis determined that it had to be removed. I attempted to fight this, which escalated to me being removed from the mayor's office by the police. My lawyer said it was a hopeless case. They now demanded that I remove ALL antennas from the property, even the TV antenna. All ham radio activity ceased in 1995.
This city has had a long list of corrupt officials including the first mayor who went to prision for defrauding the city, got out and ran for election again and almost won. The mayor I fought with was disbarred for ethics and is no longer around. Most of his henchmen are gone, and the code nazis are busy with all the empty houses. So about 4 years ago I put up a wire antenna that I got at a hamfest, got a cheap Yeasu and plugged it in. Didn't even solder my own coax! It will work Europe on 20M using JT65 and 5 watts.
I upgraded my license to extra because there was a group of ex Motorolans that used an extra only frequency. I discovered that "progress" in the form of a set of 250 KV transmission lines have moved in right across the street. These have made it impossible to use any frequency below 7 MHZ and raise the noise level of the entire HF band. My 902 MHZ experiments have always been limited by IMD products coming from a massive cell site about 1 mile away. Last weekend I was out of town and returned to find a brand new cell tower right across the street. It is not active yet, but It can't be a good thing.
A simple regen made with tubes, mosfets, or even kryptonite has very limited selectivity. Granted they can be made sensitive enough in to work great in a low noise environment. I guarantee you, that it will not work as good as any radio with decent filtering in a dense RF environment like this. The "S" meter on the Yeasu sits just above +9 on 40 meters and +5 on 10. On a humid summer night it is pegged on 80M. My 902 antenna sees -15 dbm per carrier with 50+ carriers from 870 MHz to 896 MHz. The 902 weak signal frequency is 902.1 MHz. I hope the new tower is for LTE at 700 MHz or 3G at 1900.
You need extreme linearity and low noise to acheive the dynamic range needed to pull a weak signal out of that mess. The low end Yeasu will NOT do it, so I am slowly working on something that will. About the only parts that are linear enough are those designed for cellular and public safety base stations. Look at the circuits in a $10,000 Yeasu or Icom contesting radio. They use triple conversion for main selectivity and 24 bit convertors feeding an IF DSP for slicing one weak CW signal from between two strong ones a few Hz away. Tune through the CW band with a spectrum analyzer equipped radio on a contest day to see why this is needed.
Ja, ja ja... And when the new switchers (I know them from LT) operating between 1 and 10MHz, the HF bands will be briefly absolutely unusable, as soon as they enter in the massive market of electronic thrash.
I have lived in the same house for almost 35 years. I bought it for $40K in 1977. The same house down the block sold for $327K at the height of the insanity. Now they are going for about $140K.
I have worked in the Motorola plant for the past 40 years. I started as a factory tech, and have been a design engineer for the last 30 years. Mot paid for me to go to school and collect a couple of engineering degrees.
Things have changed a lot in 40 years and us old timers are an endangered species. Since the plant was built, NOBODY has made it to 45 years of service. I will hold on to my job as long as they keep me, then it is.....time to move.
I have never lived anywhere but here for 60 years. I have already got a house in small town West Virginia. I expect that I will be there sometime in the next few years.
A modern LCD TV is a pretty good jamming device. The QRM here is above the level of the TV radiated stuff, there is no change in reception with the TV on or off. My Yeasu is sitting right on top of a cheap Jetstream variable SMPS without ill effects here. Other users of this power supply report QRM.
I designed iDEN cell phones for a few years about 12 years ago. iDEN is worst case for phones since it uses 25 KHz wide RF channels. A switcher or processor clock harmonic can take out a complete channel. A similar spur will only cause a BER (bit error rate) degradation on an LTE or CDMA channel. We devised clock shift and dithering methods that are now commonplace in switchers and fast digital systems.
I now work in public safety radio design where 12.5 KHz channels are the norm. We designed and built a mobile radio that ran full duplex narrow band data (transmits and receives at the same time on different frequencies in the same band) and made 100 watts of peak power. It used a 200 watt switcher operating at 1 MHz to power the transmitter. The receiver made -121 dbm sensitivity with 80 db IM rejection while the transmitter was running 13 MHz away. A DSP and a host processor are also operating inside the radio. We know how to deal with switchers and DSP's that are within our domain. All equipment sold in the USA are supposed to meet FCC standards for EMI emission. We all know that that isn't always the case.
The test has become a rather simple inconvinience. It is multiple guess. All the questions in the question pool are posted on the internet....with answers. We used to call this cheating in school.
There are web sites where you can take practice tests for free. Each test is randomized with diferent questions. Just spend an afternoon taking them over and over again until you consistently score in the 80% range, then go for the real test before the memory fades.....that's a few hours in my case!
I was in high school when i got my general -- i had to take the code portion 3 times before i passed it -- and then i fell in love with 40m CW.
all the equipment i have now, save for the Eico 753, is stuff i would have loved to own.
i also purchased a HT32/SX101A/HT33 from a guy in Connecticut -- pick up only -- and you had to purchase the entire station! one of the docs who practiced medicine with my uncle had this same station in independence Ohio.
all the equipment i have now, save for the Eico 753, is stuff i would have loved to own.
i also purchased a HT32/SX101A/HT33 from a guy in Connecticut -- pick up only -- and you had to purchase the entire station! one of the docs who practiced medicine with my uncle had this same station in independence Ohio.
I have a FT767, a FT2400 (actually in 145070 PKT), and FT7800 for fone (144560 QAP), the antennas all made in home with copper tubing (a vertical 10mts 1/4 lambda that uses my ceiling plates as the ground plane, a vertical for 2 colineal 1/4 plus 1/2 in phase with a stub (FT2400) and a slot skeletos 1/2 lambda for fone (FT7800), and a folded dipole horizontal for 10mts made of 2.5mm electric standard wire.
Under the antennas, there are 9 solar cells of 10Pk e/a and a switching regulator made and designed of my own (two 100KHz SMPS in parallel antiphase), and a 160Ah truck battery, from which all of them, but the 767 are powered (this is to 220V Power line), plus a Am7910 fsk modem made also by me, and some 12V low power lamps from Osram (11W), one in each room for the frequent cases when 220VCA turns to 0VCA.
Under the antennas, there are 9 solar cells of 10Pk e/a and a switching regulator made and designed of my own (two 100KHz SMPS in parallel antiphase), and a 160Ah truck battery, from which all of them, but the 767 are powered (this is to 220V Power line), plus a Am7910 fsk modem made also by me, and some 12V low power lamps from Osram (11W), one in each room for the frequent cases when 220VCA turns to 0VCA.
You get up to a year after expiration to renew without having to take any tests.
During the morning of the ham cram one of the teachers mentioned the practice tests at Callsign Database by QRZ.COM. I got out my netbook, registered, and took all three practice tests and passed while the teachers were going on (apparently I didn't miss much of what they were saying), so I had good confidence I would pass.
But even with my decades of accumulated technical knowledge, it did seem just a little too easy. I've heard that in very recent years amateur radio is making a resurgence, though it was dying out over the last couple of decades with the rise of the Internet. Does anyone have any historical figures for licensed hams offhand?
But it seems the tests have been dumbed down over the decades in an effort to get more people into amateur radio and keep it from dying out.
A bit over 700,000 Amateur Radio Station Statistics
I enjoyed "Field Day" -- and remember that it took months for the results to show up.
I have never been interested in contesting either. I have done a few field days though. There is a ham club here (W4MOT) and I am still one of the few members left. We used to do a multi pronged attack on field day. About half of the club would go to a local county park, set up one or two towers, a few generators, and generally raise the RF level of the Everglades by a few dB. There was a field day about a week after the opening of the 902-928 MHZ band to ham radio (1985?). I made a few radios for that band which gave us the first documented contact on the band in Florida (possibly the US) and one more band than everyone else had. I would help set up the towers and then crank up my ATV rig and show off our set up to South Florida through one of the ATV repeaters.
One of our club members keeps claiming that there are more licensed hams now than there ever was. Don't know what his source is.
Back in the 60's you had to take the ham test at the local FCC field office if you lived within 50 miles of one. I had studied and could do about 7 WPM but my father never found the time to take me to the FCC, so my Hallicrafters S-46 and ARC-5 never got used.
I wandered into a testing session at the Miami hamfest one day back in the 80's and got my Novice license, but never used it. A year or two later a friend and I were sitting at our table on a rainy day at the Broward hamfest when the announcer said that they were giving license tests. We went to the ARRL table, bought the study book, studied for about an hour, then took the test. Neither of us gould do the 13WPM code but both of us passed the General written. At the time there was a license called the Tech-Plus which we both got. I kept mine current for the past 25 years or so. The Tech-Plus can be converted to a General today IF you can prove that you got it during the two or three year period that it used the same written test as the general.
For years the only acceptable proof was the ORIGINAL license which I did not have. This all changed when old call books got published on the internet. My Tech-Plus showed up in the 1986 and later call books, and a local ham club agreed that this was sufficient proof. They just wanted me to come to a testing session, pay the testing/filing fee and walk out with a general ticket. I asked "if I am paying the test fee, can I take the extra test and walk away with an extra if I pass." They agreed, I passed. I used the QRZ practice tests for a whole day on the test night. I was consistently getting 100, and I had seen all of the 200 possible questions several times.
I haven't taken the test yet either, but I can ace the online US tests up to a technicians licence.
I sometimes listen in on one of the following:
Kenwood TS-430
Trio TS-510
2x Trio 9R-59DS
Realistic DX-394
However, even with a Bhi DSP I find it difficult to copy much of anything where I am living at the moment, the power box here is jam packed with smart meters which completely obliterate the bands, which is the main reason why I am limited in getting my licence, even though thats not really a limitation, I just like/prefer HF more than VHF/UHF.
That and the finances are going towards good audio at the moment
(*#)(@*)(#@ SMART METERS!!!
The only morse I know is SOS and CQ DX, but I learnt CQ DX not so long back while playing Fallout 3, so I am progressing
Oh theres another reason too why I am hesitant in going to the local club to get my licence, one of the hams there stole from me while I was at a swap meet, since then I've been hesitant to pick up the hobby and quite possibly talk to the person who stole from me.
I would much rather get into HAM once I've got a SDR and a proficient hand in CW.
I sometimes listen in on one of the following:
Kenwood TS-430
Trio TS-510
2x Trio 9R-59DS
Realistic DX-394
However, even with a Bhi DSP I find it difficult to copy much of anything where I am living at the moment, the power box here is jam packed with smart meters which completely obliterate the bands, which is the main reason why I am limited in getting my licence, even though thats not really a limitation, I just like/prefer HF more than VHF/UHF.
That and the finances are going towards good audio at the moment
(*#)(@*)(#@ SMART METERS!!!
The only morse I know is SOS and CQ DX, but I learnt CQ DX not so long back while playing Fallout 3, so I am progressing
Oh theres another reason too why I am hesitant in going to the local club to get my licence, one of the hams there stole from me while I was at a swap meet, since then I've been hesitant to pick up the hobby and quite possibly talk to the person who stole from me.
I would much rather get into HAM once I've got a SDR and a proficient hand in CW.
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