After careful consideration, I’ve decided the ham radio community is exactly like the Linux community. Except instead of teenagers, you’re dealing with fairly articulate greybeards. People who take themselves way too seriously, more with strong opinions that can’t *possibly* be proven incorrect, and lots of smackdown to anyone who is unaware or ignorant (usually newbies) of some bit of information. I can’t believe there is so much hate for CB people from hams; moreso I can’t believe it keeps getting constantly rehashed over and over. “It’s just a radio,” isn’t it?
I picked up my FT-857 on Thursday along with fix’ns to wire it up in the truck. I went with LMR-400 Ultraflex cable because I’m clearly a yuppie with a dispoable income. The stuff is certainly beefy, almost a half-inch in diameter. Putting on PL-239 ends was easiler (a new 80 W soldering iron helps) since it was harder to burn through all two (!) layers of shielding and inner core. I gave in and took a drill to my truck’s bed railing and mounted a 140/440 Diamond antenna. Someday I’ll figure out antenna duplexing and ditch the other whips.
I resisted buying the matching ATAS-120 HF antenna. From what I read on eHam.net, there’s enough people having problems with their units when they get wet to make me apprehensive about owning one. I may wind up buying a Little Tarheel or something similar.
One thing I’m already missing with the 857 is a keypad for direct frequency entry. The solution to this appears to be a new mic with a built-in keypad. Operating the 857 definately requires cracking open the manual. Having used the 7R for a few weeks now, I sort of get how Yaesu’s interface works, but they still throw in some surprises on the 857.
I drove up to Oklahoma on Friday. I hit some nasty traffic congestion in Dallas, which took two hours to go through. On the way up I hit up army surplus in Killeen and bought a thigh holster for my HK. While slogging through traffic in Plano, I stopped by Texas Towers to check out their store. I have no idea where the promising local mom & pop radio store is in Dallas, this place wasn’t that interesting at all.
On the way up I also bought a 26′ dipole antenna. At the very least I hope I can use that on my balcony at my apartment. I rigged it up in my parents’ backyard to the 857. It was neat to finally see my radio come to life on HF and scan around the bands. I heard quite a few stations transmitting high speed Morse code, but too fast for me to understand it. I need a decoder of some sort.
Tonight I added 76 feet worth of wire and extended the dipole out to 102 feet, which is about 3/8 wavelength at 80 meters. I almost ran out of yard, 100 feet is roughly 1/3rd of a block. I see now why dipoles are made of 14 gauge wire, it takes a lot of tension to hold 102 feet of cable horizontally flat.
The new extended dipole picked up quite a few more Morse conversations on the lower frequencies. Somewhere down on 160 meters I heard a couple of guys ragchewing, but I didn’t figure out where they were at. Tooling around in the broadcast AM radio bands I picked up stations from San Antonio, Galveston, Dallas, and St. Louis (all hundreds of miles away). The big thing I was after was propogation beacons. Even with the hugeass dipole (and using all CW, SSB/AM, USB, LSB, FM modes) I wasn’t picking up anything on 5m, 10m, 20m nor any of the NCDXF beacons. I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, the atmosphere just sucks this weekend, if the dipole needs to be more than 8′ off the ground, or what.
