/hamradio/ - Electronics

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>what are you going to do via shortwave?

Shitpost like I've never shitposted before.

Get on 6666kHz and 10420kHz and cheeki breeki with the surviving ruskies. Maybe with some 3400kHz AM thrown in and 3900kHz EC thrown in.

Everybody radios will be dead from EMP, except those who have vacuum tube (valve) radios. But then no one will have the power to run one. And who will listen?

>>1076

The dreaded emp is still just the same kind of electromagnetic radiation your radio was designed to detect. Just too much of it. Keep your antenna and power connectors capped off and/or put your radio in an ammo can.

Most military radios today are tested to withstand a typical nuclear EMP. It’s not a death ray that will wipe out everything electrical.

>>1092

On the bright side, it'll sure clean up the airwaves.

>>1099

System Fusion is an abortion that should fuck off and die. It's a gimped P25 (this also answers why hams dont have P25 widely, because patents and license fees beyond the codec), but not compatible with P25 or any existing digital mode.

Even worse, it's not gimped Tier2 P25, it's the old tier1 one.

>>1100

freeDV with codec2 is 100% free, but the only "Production" radio with it are chinese clones of M0NKA mcHF, which includes I think 1600A version of freeDV. There is also one satellite with it.

>>1105

Nokia PMR division → EADS → Cassidian → Airbus Defence.

I have some Nokia and EADS TETRA handsets, strictly 410-430MHz only.

My Sepura TETRA's do 407-470MHz with good 70cm sensitivity, unlike 410-430MHz band motorolas hacked for out of band.

TETRA is now the "new hotness" for those of us liking weird stuff, same folks who used to run the P25 repeater around here.

Thankfully DMR won the ham digital voice thing here.

There's a couple of pockets of YSF due to cheap repeaters, but those are usually run in analog mode (or have blown finals).

The DMR network here also has parts of it's internet backhaul done by 5.6GHz hamband microwave links, so parts of it can stay linked even without internet connectivity.

The links and repeaters also have backup power.

I'm tempted to replace my MD380 with an Alinco DMR handheld. Dual band 2m/70cm DMR+Analog and made by a real ham manufacturer? Nice!

>>1107

>System Fusion is an abortion that should fuck off and die. It's a gimped P25

So Yaesu/Vertex did the same thing Kenwood and Icom did with NXDN? The Japanese seem oddly focused on 6.25kHz for some reason, which is weird considering that one would assume their domestic market would be ideal for TDMA solutions.

It's a shame your division got bought out by Motorola, given that they provided tech to so many other manufacturers.

TETRA is cool; it's a shame it never got much penetration in the US, because it'd be ideal for a lot of industrial setups. How are you guys setting it up to run on HAM bands? I've never seen much on the web about it's use in amateur applications.

Alinco's new portables all seem to be rebadged CCR's with some QA applied. Looking at the promotional images, I see the old familiar stink of Chinese firmware on the display. I hope I'm mistaken; we need an alternative to the big three.

>>1108

6.25kHs is more likely from USA narrow banding. first 25kHz to 12.5kHz and now 12.5kHz to 6.25kHz channels. DMR/MotoTRBO cheats by hving two timeslots in a 12.5kHz channel and thus qualifies for using "half" of the bandwidth as previous systes.

If by division you are refering to the Nokia PMR division, it did not get bough by Motorola, they bough a tiny part that did dispatch software or something like that?

Makes sense considering they bought the UK govt Airwave TETRA network.

We have a couple od DMO (single channel TDMA) repeaters for 70cm experiments and are planing on internet linking them.

The Danes and Germans have larger amounts of linked DMO repeaters and the germans have one TMO (proper full duplex TETRA base station).

For hamband TETRA we use 70cm and mostly Sepura's and Motorolas. There is also a hobbyist network on commercial 417/427 duplex frequeny pair. Around 20-150 users for that, most hams.

If you want to do HAM tetr, buy a used Motorola (as you can pirate th CPS and buy a cheap programming cable) or Sepura, on Sepura side I'd suggest STP8240, cheap, has SMA as antenna connector, is supported by RadioManager 1.8, which can be pirated and programming cables are available or easily made from the portable charger cable, IIRC just a 3.3V TTL serial port.

For the price Sepura's are a better deal, if you get one's supported by RadioManager 1.8.

RadioMnager 2.0 is around 150EUR if bought and is locked to a single machine. It does not run in a VM, we tried.

Yeah. Alinco's lower end proucts are rebadged or modified Anytone. Tho Anytone is from the less shit end of chinese manufacturers.

>>1107

>Thankfully DMR won the ham digital voice thing here.

DMR rules new england. Quick count on the repeater directory shows around 70 repeaters most linked to the ARES network or DMR-MARC. If your a repeaterhead and just want to ragchew its the system to get on. The 2M analog repeaters are dead.

>>1112

Fuck it. I'm staying on sideband then.

you know, for some odd reason, with my radio, I've never been able to pick up anyone on 14.313, are the signals too weak for my portable antenna? or do I just have bad timing?

but when listening to 27.025 however, I get plenty of chaos there, particularly around 0200 onwards.

>>631

I go on 27.025 and I just hear weird beeps

>>558

What a bunch of faggots.

>hurr these guys say MEAN THINGS they should go to JAIL REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

>>635

THE NUMBERS

>>635

>I go on 27.025 and I just hear weird beeps

Thats cb CH6 aka Da Bowl.

Mostly just redecks and dindu's running dirty 1-10KW amps yelling over each other on AM.

They're probably dead already.

telephoto compression nowhere near as close as it look. fucking LID retards

>>627

with the stucco-foam house I'd say they live in southern california, a shitty place that is wtf as it is.

It would be, because the frequency bands are re-used on new satellites and thus you would interfere with them.

In general just transmitting on those bands, even unsuccesfully would be illegal.

And if you want to pirate voice coms, there are better thargets like the 255MHz US Navy milsats. And more or less all the TV satellites have some unused transponder capacity at the edges.

Just be aware that pirating satellites IS posecuted in usa an milsat pirats have gotten rather large fines.

Most pirates for those systems are in brazil and russia.

>>985

or just poor

>>989

Ya baofeng is a fine entry level rig, when one is aware about it's short comings.

Had a lovely demo on an licensing course.

Wouxun (cheap, but traditional superhet receiver) next to a UV-5R baofeng (with it's low-if DSP receiver) Both on 433.550MHz

And then keying up with a TETRA handheld on 427MHz. Lovely TDMA of the TETRA transmission made the baofeng give out all kinds of funny noises while the wouxun did not.

The 4x in price does mean something.

That does not mean I don't own any boafengs.

I have two of them.

>>962

You get what you pay for. They're cheap. They're questionably legal. They do very little hand-holding. The software and firmware is garbage. Performance blows and is almost always worse than advertised. They fail in bizarre, counter-intuitive ways, and they fail all the time.

There's a difference between a $15 Chinese handheld, a $250 amateur handheld, and an $8,000 professional handheld. If a $15 radio was good enough, nobody would buy the $5,000 radios.

>>985

baofeng HTs blow the shit out of any name brand handheld I’ve ever used.

Yes on the bench their specs are inferior. But comparing their ability to make a repeater contact they’re equivalent. Yes, it’s possible to get one with a piece of plastic jammed in the mic hole and your xmit audio will suck. But, you can buy three more HTs for the price of an icom microphone. So there’s push and pull.

My last HT was a VX5R that I lost on a night training mission. If I lose my baofeng I’ll just get another one for $40.

I think it’s better to get a cheap HT than to spend years saving for an expensive one. Then you can begin deciding how invested you are in it.

>>1094

I wish.

Any more RF dense enviroment and it shits the bed. Had to change from baofeng back to wouxun because the squelch kept hammering open on any setting when in some parts of town.

>>1098

holy shit, that's nuts.

The closet I got is an old dude in a nursing home. cool guy, rambles a lot but never heard anything terribly crazy or odd about him. just that he was old as hell (sounds like 80s/90s).

A "I don't go on air because it's full of fucking retards" whinge.

Last Sunday there was a big Antenna lecture extravaganza about 100 miles away that I'd waited a month to go to, but a few days ago the starter motor in my motorbike exploded. Bugger.

So, I turned on the radio to listen to the local VHF repeater to see if anyone else had plans to attend, so I could beg a lift from them… Instead, I got:

VK2FourWheelDriveOwner: I can'ts upload to youtubes from my smartphones

VK2AdvancedRetiree: Use a computer.

VK2FourWheelDriveOwner: MAHSMARTHPONE!

[30 minutes later]

VK2FourWheelDriveOwner: <…> I'm 20 minutes from my driveway

[later]

VK2FourWheelDriveOwner: I can Echolink from my smartphone

[later]

VK2FourWheelDriveOwner: I'm going through …. <never copied because the retard spent 5 solid minutes to give half a sentence in his Over, repeating himself about 60 times>

[later]

VK2FourWheelDriveOwner: I wants to buy a new smartphone this one don't werk

[later]

VK2FourWheelDriveOwner: cekewcekewcekew <blah> Listening

No fucking way I was going to risk spending ~5 hours in a 4WD with that vegetable if he replied to my request. I stayed home.

You could use a Text-to-speech program.

If anyone asks why you use it, just tell them that you are very shy about your voice.

>>579

>Just say hi. Nothing bad is gonna happen.

Fuck you, Anon. I tried that, and…

…a guy breakered and bitched about someone playing 'silly buggers with the repeater'

…and got into a ragchew with the guy who had attempted to do the QSO with me.

…that went on for about 30 minutes

Fucking hell, pls let this be a joke.

>>1053

>If anyone asks why you use it, just tell them that you are very shy about your voice.

>not telling everyone that asks that you're a robot

I'm stoked for the qrp-labs QSX kit. 150usd for a all band, all mode 10W rig with a case as a kit. SDR guts with well designed analog frontend.

>>1060

Since Qrp-Labs stopped shipping from Japan.

And regarding QSX, it's a more involved build than uBITX. So I'äd suggest uBITX to someone new to homebrewing.

I have skimmed the construction manual for 40m QSX, as it was the kit build at the 2018 South-African YOTA (I was not there, but I know people who ware).

So there are some of those kits built an on the air. But those are mono band prototype series.

The QSX 10W PA is also available as a separate kit from Qrp-Labs, so I have that coming in.

But i fully expect the QSX to be an excellent rig, if they have not fucked up the software.

Early M0NKA mcHF software had shot dynamic range, a more talented dude did some fixes and casually pulled something like 50dB more dynamic range from the design with software fixes only. QSX has a related MCU to the mcHF so potential for the same capabilities.

>>1038

Usb sucks way more than rj45.

The usb connector was made for a shitty keyboard or mouse you’ll plug in twice. It’s rated for hundreds of insertions. This is still true today even in light of things like thumb drives.

Today the biggest factor in how durable a usb plug is is “when will Verizon send me my next phone?”

Usb connectors are shite for mobile use and unlike serial when there is a tiny dropout, your OS closes file handles and forgets all about the device. When this happens in rs232 you lose a byte or two.

>>828

Shit, I'm happy w/ a 3:1 VSWR. Anything better is icing on the cake. That's a 6dB return loss, perfectly acceptable, to me anyways.

Need more home brew projects. Any ideas? Complaints? Concerns?

>>1044

1) Buy a second-hand transceiver. Go to a club meeting and ask around

2) Buy a baofeng UV-5R or baofeng UV-82 and use a repeater

73

>>1067

not radio, audio. Skip the modulation entirely.

But kinda dumb, as every device with a speaker these days also has a wifi interface.

>>1066

interference works itself out with most digital modulation schemes, because it's the phase relationships within any one signal that carry the data. Two signals in the same channel have a random and varying phase relationship to each other, but within each signal the phase information carrying the data stays intact.

>>1069

Wifi is quite short in range, especially if not line of sight. 2.4GHz is a trashband filled with crap.

Are you confusing PSK with CDMA?

CDMA would allow multiple users on the same frequency, but is non-trivial to do.

Unlike (a)FSK with listen–before-talk.

>>890

http://www.ve7kfm.com/happymeal.mp3

I once had a good qso with him. Then there was a flood of abuse directed to him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGwwIJ6sQao

http://www.ve7kfm.com/

>>845

You may be more interested in pirate radio/tv than ham, honestly. The FCC doesn't really go after pirates on the broadcast bands unless they're causing enough interference to be noticed. Digital TV is so sparse there are gigantic gaps of unused spectrum you can just slip into with a low power signal.

Or you can get a relatively affordable microbroadcast license if you meet a few qualifications. I think the most costly part is acquiring a working EAS receiver.

The point of the ham restrictions is not to eliminate fun, it's to stress the difference between communication and broadcasting. You can have a net every night at the same time. You can transmit a QST every night at the same time. You just can't run a radio/TV show. You can't play shows or music because that's what broadcast stations are for. You can, however, have a formatted net where you show your latest ham-related discoveries to anyone who's checked in and listening/watching. It just has to be two-sided and of a "chit-chat" nature. If it starts to smell like commercial programming then it's not allowed.

WRT the "fun factor

sorry, … the "fun factor," some people actually do think it's fun.

I get discouraged when 90% of the communications out there are about gas pain and doctor appointments and arthritis but I have had some truly fascinating conversations that went much deeper than weather and lunch.

I think most people just stick with the format of the old code exams and never try to improvise. "Well, the XYL says dinner is ready so must 73…"

>>1065

Listen before talk.

So if there is an ongoing transmission, the modem waits. The APRS system works like this.