Amateur Radio

Is anyone else doing Field Day? How's it going? In the NE US, it's been very hot and humid with occasional thunderstorms.

Running a QRP station here and taking a break for the evening. Planning on getting up early tomorrow.

I had a VE session the day of the hack so I'm glad to see things are working again.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/12513834

American Radio Relay League cyberattack takes Logbook of the World offline

The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) warns it suffered a cyberattack, which disrupted its IT systems and online operations, including email and the Logbook of the World. [...]

cross-posted from: https://real.lemmy.fan/post/2770288

They need help scanning twenty more pallets of stuff.

They need help scanning twenty more pallets of stuff.

Just moving in to our first home, and I'm very excited to have the freedom to set up a permanent HF antenna.

I'll probably build a sort of fan dipole and run it along the side of our property. That's the only place long enough to fit. However, the power lines for the neighborhood run over part of our backyard. I'm not worried about my dipole being too close to high voltage power (it won't be) but I wonder if the AC frequency can cause interference on certain bands?

I've got an itch to activate a particularly difficult-to-activate POTA park. The few who found success did so with a barely-qualifying amount of digital or CW contacts with the exception of two prominent and skilled phone operators (and one of them had to give it a second try another day). What brings the difficulty is the terrain: the park is a ~~RF pit of despair~~ beach with 20m tall shear cliffs into the surrounding mountains. It's also remote enough to make spotting difficult; there's no cell nor a APRS repeater for self-spotting.

There are a few strategies I could go for, like beaming into the ocean for KH and VK stations, but I think this park is just about the perfect case for NVIS propagation. I'll probably give my EFHW a shot in an inverted V or sloper configuration, but I'm also thinking of building:

• A basic dipole since I could pump more power into it than my existing EFHW transformer can handle.

• A one-wavelength loop antenna. In theory a low loop offers a more circular radiation pattern than a dipole and slightly better gain. However, it's twice as much wire to raise.

What kind of portable antenna would you choose to operate daytime NVIS? Do you have any other ideas or thoughts?

It seems the band plans are absolutely packed with bands for repeaters, satellites, cw, ssb, slow scan tv, etc. As a new ham is there a easy diagram of the frequency spectrum of what I CAN use just for simple beginner voice transmissions?

G5TM put out a nice video where a viewer was debating between the inverted L and a compromised vertical. It's a good review between the two for folks with height limitations.

Do people have thoughts on the newest flagship HT from Kenwood? He brings up some worthwhile observations. I just got a FT5DR and I am not impressed with it's stock battery life when compared to my HTX-202 (greatest rig ever made and will ever be made) or my AnyTone AT878UVII+.

I also like him pointing out the manufactures not providing drop in chargers for these expensive rigs. It's bullshit.

EDIT: For anybody coming across the same issue, USB was the problem. I was trying to avoid having 12" of radio equipment sticking directly out of my laptop where it could easily be snapped off, so I used a little USB power meter as a short extension cord to let it bend. I don't know if it was the power meter or my laptop, but when I replaced the power meter with a short USB extension cord wrapped a few times around an ferrite E-core, the issue went away. I only got noise at the extreme horizons, and touching the antenna made no change.

I've ordered a USB extension cord with ferrite integrated to use in the future. $8 on Amazon.

I'm working on a V-dipole to pick up 137.5MHz NOAA APT transmissions. I found that when lowering the antenna closer to ground than my design, performance improved. I believe this is because the pavement in front of my house is not a great conductor, so my reflecting ground plane is actually a few inches below the surface.

The thing I can't explain is why I get such a dramatic improvement in performance when I use my finger to touch just the arm of the dipole connected to the center conductor of the coax. The difference is night and day. The surrounding noise in the signal drops to the point that it’s inaudible, but the radio signal is relatively unaffected. Touching the shield conductor does nothing.

I picked up a cheap VNA and was able to determine that touching the antenna does slightly de-tune it, but the impact is the same for both arms. With the configuration I have, the SWR is something like 1.07 before touching it, and it rises to around 1.2 when I do.

I've heard about surface currents that can cause problems, but those only occur on the outside of the shield conductor, and I have a ferrite choke right at the feed point anyway.

What's going on here?

EDIT: to add that I'm using a Nooelec SDR with a SAW filter tuned to NOAA frequencies as well as a terrestrial AM blocker. This is connected to a Framework laptop on battery power. I'm curious if this could be an electrical issue coming from my laptop.

@amateur_radio does anybody know how to unlock an Anytone 878 after shipping? I’ve pressed Menu and * I have plugged it into the software and the four options to select aren’t showing up. I’m stuck.

I don't seem to be receiving emails from the internet despite having the addresses in my whitelist.

Does anyone know if I'm missing a setting somewhere? I do receive other Winlink emails.

He has a lot of good tutorials and covers a lot of RPi stuff. Worth checking out.

@amateur_radio Just passed my Technician test!! Looking into the Anytone 878. Is this a good or bad first unit?