Gettin' the HF itch

[MaxPF]

And after seeing this full size 80m 5 element rotary beam it makes me realize that I need some serious acerage to do it right:

This antenna belongs to 7J4AAL, and is located near Hiroshima, Japan. The boom (center part holding the radiating elements for you non-hams) is 42 meters in length. To give you an idea how big it is, look at the close-up pic here on his QSO card - note the guy standing on the beam :whaa:

Imagine how big a full size 160m beam would be! I'm sure someone has one

Unfortunately, I will have to stick with a cheesy wire dipole for any HF I want to do :shame:

 

[Gunner_45]

I thought you guys could just hook onto a barbed wire fence and talk all the way to the Triangulum Australe constellation.

:wink:

 

[alrock]

I think we can build one in Todd's backyard out of a few erector sets.

 

[Hunner]

I did not quite match the size of those but I tried!
I never moved on to Ham but I did a lot of 11 meter am and SSB. I had a Moonraker 6 vertical and horizontal with a near dead back end so I could transmit and hear in a tight beam. It covered the radius of the house.

I used a two piece tube type Browning Golden Eagle radio. Yea, I know, old school again but it was sweet!
I had a golden EIB mic before Rush Limbaugh!! ha ha
I must have used a pin hole camera to shoot this.

If you look close upper right there is a rotary dial telephone, man I gotta figure out the date of this picture!

 

[MaxPF]

I used a two piece tube type Browning Golden Eagle radio.

When I was into ham radio as a teenager I used tube gear. Nothing wrong with it if it works! Nowandays I am a bit more high-tech. My plans for a home QTH rig is an entirely SDR based setup using GNURadio. I will probably build my own direct conversion front end and use the sound card for the ADC. Eventually I want to build a wideband receiver with a high sample rate ADC fed into the computer via ethernet so that I can sample a larger IF bandwidth, but that will take more design time and money. For now, the 20KHz bandwidth afforded by the sound card will be adequate. Likewise, the transmitter will be digitally synthesized using available IC's, with around 50-100 watts output, with all the modulation done in software. Then I can build a 1.5KW amp later. These days, the hardware is simple due to the various canned receiver and synthesis ICs available. Since all the hard stuff is done in software it keeps the cost low compared to an equivalent high end transceiver.

 

[Hunner]

Technology has come a long way. I remember the hype and expansion of the "transistor radio"
Heck when Radio Shack quit carrying tubes and got rid of the tube tester the price of re-tubing went out of site.
I would have to start from scratch to get involved in what you describe.
I think I will stick to the internet and the ability to send digital images with limited equipment but I enjoy following you guys that are sharing your equipment builds.
The Hummer is a good way to get to remote places to set up and try to contact the world. I did that in my day in a Chevy Van at Forest Service towers around the state with the 11 meter CB and carried a quad we could set up on a push up and ran everything on invertors and generators. I gotta find those pictures.
I'm from the teletype age and used those at KWAK yep Quack radio in Stuttgart the rice and duck capitol of the world, AM broadcasting on 1240 KC night and day for your listening pleasure. ha ha ha
Carry on!

 

[DJinCO]

I am pretty sure that 80m beam would not be allowed in my neighborhood.

 

[LagunaH1]

Yannow.... a "cheesy wire dipole" really isn't shabby. Some of us can't even do that, due to HOA's and other evils

 

[MaxPF]

Technology has come a long way. I remember the hype and expansion of the "transistor radio"
Heck when Radio Shack quit carrying tubes and got rid of the tube tester the price of re-tubing went out of site.
I would have to start from scratch to get involved in what you describe.
I think I will stick to the internet and the ability to send digital images with limited equipment but I enjoy following you guys that are sharing your equipment builds.
The Hummer is a good way to get to remote places to set up and try to contact the world. I did that in my day in a Chevy Van at Forest Service towers around the state with the 11 meter CB and carried a quad we could set up on a push up and ran everything on invertors and generators. I gotta find those pictures.
I'm from the teletype age and used those at KWAK yep Quack radio in Stuttgart the rice and duck capitol of the world, AM broadcasting on 1240 KC night and day for your listening pleasure. ha ha ha
Carry on!

Software Defined Radio can be done on the cheap, as long as you are OK with 50-860MHz (or 50-2200MHz, depending on who you ask) operation, receive only, limited sensitivity and dynamic range, and other limitations. This is due to the availability of cheap DVB-T dongles that use the Realtek RTL2832U chip. While not stellar, they are cheap (about $20). Combined with GNU Radio, which is FREE, and you have a functional wideband SDR receiver. Thats a meager investment to get your feet wet. You can get started by installing GNU Radio. Note that at this time Windows compilation is problematic, so if you're still using Windows you are best off to download the .exe from Ettus. Best bet is to run Fedora (or RHEL or CentOS) or Ubuntu. MacOSX also works. Other real OSes like the BSD's and Solaris will compile and run GNU Radio with little difficulty, but you probably won't find pre-built binaries. In the final analysis, the development of GNU Radio is done on Fedora and Ubuntu systems, so Linux has the best hardware support and dependencies are more easily taken care of. I run Fedora, and installing GNU Radio was a simple matter. It's not the latest version, but the latest version of any needed dependencies WERE installed with it, so I could simply uninstall it and install the latest precompiled version from Ettus's site without worrying about any missing dependencies.

Anyway, once it is installed you don't even need ANY hardware to learn how to use it. Start by going here and opening "GNU Radio Companion - Tutorial 1". Go through all four tutorials and you will have a good grasp of how stuff works. Tutorials 3 and 4 require raw data files as input sources - the needed files are linked beneath the link to the tutorial. By the time you are done you will build an AM reeiver and a SSB receiver, all in software. It's really cool stuff :thumbs:

I am pretty sure that 80m beam would not be allowed in my neighborhood.

Yannow.... a "cheesy wire dipole" really isn't shabby. Some of us can't even do that, due to HOA's and other evils

You can do a cheesy wire dipole - you hang it under the eaves where it isn't visible. Thats what makes it a cheesy wire dipole