Starting a new adventure...

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 I have decided to be active in amateur radio once more so this is to track this.



Popular posts from this blog

EFHW antenna and the dodgy 49:1 Unun

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You might remember the 49:1 UnUn I had built on a small cardboard box. (Actually I might not have blogged about that, I'll do a post later). Successfully tested on Saturday. Two contacts under 10 mins, then we got cold and walked back home. 9m pole, 10m of thin wire, couple of metres of counter-poise, SWR was 1:1.5 or better at 14MHz. 2.5W to it and we bagged two contacts right away.
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FT8 UHF contest

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It was fun. I did 6 contacts and M7 did one. We used the FT-818 and the cheap Nagoya 2/70cm clone next to the potted plants in front of the window, vertically and we still made some contacts. I also tried the 70cm ZL Special inside but that didn't work well.
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Antenna analyzer - ordered

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 I've got too many antennas lying around, I can no longer remember what they were for. 50MHz? 144MHz, 430MHz? Dual band? Single band? Not a clue. I've ordered a £30 NanoVNA (vector network analyzer) off Amazon, arriving tomorrow with Prime. It looks like one of the many cheap VNAs on Ebay/Amazon but reviews are very good. This will do up to 900MHz but even that's way too high for my current hobby (which is more concentrated on the HF side), and that is spectacular price / performance point. I cannot believe these things exist, about 15-20y ago a Vector Network Analyzer cost big bucks and was a lab bench equipment only companies and insane amateurs could afford - this thing is slightly larger than a credit card and only 30 quids! Simply my mind is blown. I've watched a couple of videos and I'm quite sure this will be enough for my own purposes. I don't have any GHz equipment and don't care about that right now. It will be perfect for managing & testing an...
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