Hello from a new groupie ๐
Here's what I'm putting together while building courage to take The Exam. An Icom IC-7100, Raspberry Pi 4, 12 V lithium battery with 256 Wh capacity and a 12 V -> 2x USB power thingy forged into a solid unit that fits inside a Savotta brand MOLLE pocket with attached 30 W self-regulated solar panel designed to top up car batteries.
The Raspi is there to run JS8Call, so that I can let it run and take a peek at what's happening over VNC. I'll attach the Raspi right against the Icom's front panel fan, should keep it nice and cool since the Raspi is clad in a passive heatsink case.
Would love to hear tips and ideas from experienced hams. Particularily interested to learn about quickly deployable 70 cm antennas. There was a twist and stow antenna (possibly called Firestick or something similar) I saw on Youtube but never found those for sale on the net. Anyone out there with a link?
@fullsquare@awful.systems The antenna I was looking for: The Super-Elastic Signal Stick (tm). https://signalstuff.com/products/st-bnc/
that's just a piece of wire, perhaps some thin steel rope in a heatshrink attached to center conductor and trimmed to length. 1/4 wave at 2m which is fine, 3/4 wave at 70cm which means it'll radiate most of energy upwards (wasted) when put on a conductive plane. this works because the other half of antenna is low power, handheld radio and operator (coupled by hand capacitively). putting 100W into it would be a bad idea because all that current will travel along the coax down to radio and operator except this time there's an option of rf burns. for this kind of money, i've made two jpoles with extension cables, and the most expensive part was enclosure
i'll make a post over the weekend about j-pole antennas that i've made recently. one of them even looks halfway professional