A Growing Concern
I've been using a spool of RG-6 CATV cable of dubious quality for quite a while as my go-to source of antenna feed line because I happened to have the spool in my junk collection. Using the 75 Ω cable got me thinking about why we care what impedance the cable is and how matching [...]
Here are the slides for a presentation given to The Valley Radio Club on May 3, 2019. The hope is that the slides contain enough detail that the reader could easily build and run the examples in 4NEC2. Practical Antenna Modeling Power Point Presentation Practical Antenna Modeling PDF format slides Using the NEC Codes With Examples [...]
When I first started playing ham radio, I ran across the GR5V antenna. It seemed that a lot of folks had them, and there seemed to be a fair bit of controversy about how good/bad they were. For whatever reason, I bypassed the design and went to an off-center-fed dipole instead. Now with more experience [...]
Simple pieces of wire are not the most sexy ham radio antennas, but they are probably the most ubiquitous, if for no other reason than that their cost-performance ratio is very good. When it comes to the lower bands, there is little else that is more practical for most of us than using a wire [...]
After a few months of pondering how to build a simple pull-up vertical collinear antenna, I think I've finally got it! The motivation for such a design is the fact that I have tall trees for a support and can actually pull such an antenna up into the trees to 100 ft. or even higher. [...]
Here are the slides from a presentation I gave to the Valley Radio Club on August 4, 2017. Variations on a Dipole - Power Point Variations on a Dipole - PDF Antenna patterns are all about interference
The IC-745, like the older ICOMs, is built very robustly with parts that you can see without a magnifying glass, and which you can check with standard meters. The schematics are available on-line, the old ICOMs come up for sale on e-bay regularly, and there are support groups on line to help out when problems [...]
If you have success with any of these modifications, please drop me a note to let me know your experiences. Update 11/09/2020: Added section on adding CW KEY and PTT lines using a USB to Serial RS-232 port. Update 10/24/2023: Added section describing how to add 3.5mm audio jacks instead of using 24 pin AUX [...]
I have had a chance to use HDSDR a little more with the RTL-SDR pan-adapter for my IC-751A transceiver and have found it a very nice tool for a number of applications. Here are a few examples. Pan-adapter for rapid SSB tuning This is the obvious application. Using the RTL pan-adapter with HDSDR set to "Full [...]
The simple 20 meter pull-up vertical antenna I described last time has been working well. I've been putting my efforts into working DX stations and have found that the vertical often does almost as well as the Off Center Fed Dipole (OCFD) despite its generally lower gain. Part of the reason is that there are [...]
Squash Practice 