martin77

I bought Boost for Lemmy on day 1 and come once in a while but let's be honest people haven't migrated off Reddit (and likely never will ) so outside of a few very specific subs there is barely anything for me to read over here...

Considering the price increase and unless you really need the GPIO I don't know why you would pick this over a second hand 1L form factor PC... I love raspberry pi but since I picked up an m720q with an i5-9500t and 64 Gb of Ram that can run very intensive tasks such as a 16 slices CW/FT8/WSPR plus WebSDR and several others in Windows 11 and Linux VM or Container under proxmox they have become a very tough sell. Not to mention the way the Raspberry pi foundation treated the maker community during COVID.

It still works great: all you have to do is to create a dummy community on Reddit and set it private.

I didn't see any ad and actually had to search for the option to pay. Finally found it and was happy to 125 THB to support the developer.

Yes any obstacle will affect performance. Indoor antennas especially when using a compromise antenna like yours and QRP power is never a very fun exercise.

Ah ! s/existe/hesite !

Si OP peut trouver quelqu'un pour lui ramener un T480 des états unis alors qu'il n'hésite pas : j'ai acheté un T480 il y a quelques moins pour 180 USD et il y en a des centaines a ce prix là sur eBay.

Et comme Collioure n'a pas qu'un clocher, en voici une autre prise il quelques jours du chateau !

My first radio purchased second hand when I first got my license was a Yaesu FT-480R. It’s a multimode 144 MHz transceiver outputting 10W. I love this radio and as much as I know it was still working last time I turned it on. On one occasion I was also able to purchase the FT-780R it’s 70cm brother, a few years back. Both of those radios are almost 40 years old now. It used that FT480 a lot for packet radio as well together with a home built BayCom modem. Those were the days !

As I got hooked into packet radio, together with a small group we wanted to get into 9600 bauds on 70cm and we got different type of equipment dedicated to packet radio : First using ( i believe) Teck 1000 transceiver imported from the US and later assembling half a dozen T7F 70cm transceiver from DF2FQ ( I was fortunate to have an internship in Munich Germany, and Holger was so kind to align them personally !). We also had to upgrade our game on the modem side since the BayCom was only 1200 bds so we got a few Baycom USCC>4 cards that could take up to 4 modems and had to be installed in an ISA port on your PC ! The Linux 2.0 kernel had native support for those !

The first radio I could afford to buy new was when I got my first job in the US and that was an IC-706MKG2 with it’s AT-180. I loved that radio and used it a lot both on HF and on VHF / UHF after I finally got access to HF privilege in the early 2000 and was among the last ones to take a CW test in France.

As time passed I spent more and more time working CW and the IC-706MKG2 wasn’t cutting it anymore. I sold it and got an Elecraft K2 together with most accessories, 100W PA and 100W AT. It built the 100W PA and AT into a separate enclosure so that I could either use the K2 as a QRP transceiver on the road or as a 100W one when at the shack. I remember spending about 150 hours putting together this transceiver and seeing it’s still sold today I would recommend it to anyone. It’s a fantastic kit and a terrific radio.

The very last HF radio I bought and which continues to serve me to this date is the Elecraft K3. It was the radio I had with me when leaving in 9V and I worked thousands of DX qsos with it, most of them in CW. Due to the regulation in place in HS I could unfortunately not import it when I last relocated so it’s now back in F ( you can basically not import any modern transceiver if it has 6m and even if you get to import your transceiver you must have it checked wich will set you down by 30k THB or about 1000 USD …)

The K3 was actually not the latest HF transceiver : When leaving in 9V I got myself an FT-817ND as it was more convenient when traveling back to Europe during summer holidays. I love this little transceiver especially with the CW filter but it doesn’t has the charm of the K2. The plan has always been to use it as an IF for a 23cm transverter or eventually a QO-100 station.

A decade ago I also built a 23cm station dedicated exclusively for contesting. It’s fully mast mounted around a DB6NT 28 > 1296 MHz module outputting about 2w that drives a 7w pre-amplifier who drives a 120W 28V PA. The RX path goes through a G4DDK LNA with about 15 dB amplification and a measured NF of just 0.3 dB. The whole transverter in a weatherproof enclosure is mounted during contests using about 5 feets of coax right behind a 2m large dish at 15 feet. I have often worked over 600 km with that station.

I have spoken much about antennas. Since I have relocated so many times, I have always been renting and never had the luxury of putting up massive towers and huge yagis. I have as a rule to always keep it very simple and usually focus on very simple mono band designs. I have extensively used vertical dipoles and moxon antennas. I have a dipole for every band from 40-10m and built wire moxons from 17m to 10m using bamboo rods in 9V ! None of those very simple designs cost more than 10 dollars to build and they serve me very well !

What about you ?

I usually try to support the local association wherever I leave. I have been a member of the REF in France, the DARC in Germany, the SARTS in Singapore and now RATS in Thailand. I don't really care for what they offer ( indeed I don't even applied for a reciprocal Thai callsign) but it's more so they have the funds to support and lobby for our bands. They are the voice of our hobby against telcos who are willing to pay billions in fees for our frequencies especially in the SHF and up landscape. If no one defends those bands, we can say bye bye to anything above 70cm within a couple of years.

Yes CQRLOG is great and graphically very pleasant. For some reasons I have never managed to fully switch my desktop to Linux but if was ever, this would most likely become my application of choice for general logging.

Thanks for sharing about cloudlog. I'm not a fan of subscription based applications but as I see you can self host I will definitely start a docker instance to see how it runs.

Thanks for sharing about flecli ! I'm also a VIM and FLE user but didn't know about that one !