Afraid you can't pass the test to get an actual license?
If it's like the UK one, a one eyed monkey could pass it.
If it's like the UK one, a one eyed monkey could pass it.
You're a ham, what exactly do you do? I heard that as the hobby moved away from a technical role, much of the focus is on running contests. Who can blab with the most people in the shortest time? Like when I am stuck in a room with my wife and her friends?? There's very little wasted time. They will overlap so there's seldom a pause.Then they ask why I don't join.Rather it's "You're being quiet" My guess is they could dominate in such a contest...
I think you got it wrong there. It's still super technical and not at all sociable. Instead of having to understand radio principles and building your own gear, it's all about working out how to resolve windows audio and USB driver issues so you can get WSJT-X talking to your IC7300 so you can sit behind a keyboard at home and entirely miss the point of the mode and blast FT8 out at 100W without talking to anyone at all! Contests are all older hams I think, mostly Italians blasting from their home country, running enough power to get S9+50 on a hip implant in the UK.
As for the female of the species, as a parent of three girls, I can say that they can hold three separate conversations at the same time on a very narrow bandwidth with permanent overlap. Perhaps they are using a form of FT8
But as information and communications technologies advanced at an explosive rate through the 1980s, ham radio shifted focus from ‘home brewed’ equipment to commercial off the shelf equipment designed specifically for the ham market. In this era, newer digital techniques were being applied to generation of oscillator signals within otherwise fairly traditional receivers, transmitters, and transceivers, and equipment was evolving to fully solid state at the low to medium power level. Some might say that hams were seduced by advanced technology of off the shelf equipment, buying it and to a large extent foregoing knowledge of how it worked. Instead of being interested in how it worked, hams tended to concentrate on operating the radio. Certainly many hams would not entertain the thought of modifying the radio, it may void warranty. The transceiver was now an ‘appliance’ which was used to make on-air contact with other hams and the content of on-air discussions changed away from the technical tests and discussions.
A sizeable proportion of the ham population had evolved into principally operators, and since their interest in the technology was diminishing and had little to share in conversation with remaining technically interested hams, they focused on contests and awards. Contests and awards had their origins in recognising the skills of hams, but the contests and awards were dominated by those recognising operating skills and to some extent collecting, collecting contacts to different places, mostly distant places. A lot of contest or awards activity can be seen as like train spotting in many ways.
Contests grew and evolved, they became more frequent but specialised contests grew, and contacts transformed from a minimal duration traditional contact to mass production like contacts where in pursuit of the contest goal, the contacts did not even observe the regulatory requirements for identification of the stations. Overall, the ham community through its associations and societies rewarded this type of activity and grew the contest regime. Contesters grew to think of contests as the true ham radio activity and that it had priority over other ad-hoc contacts, that it deserved priority access to the bands and that a contest dispensed with the regulations on interference avoidance, all in the pursuit of an award.
I believe that the key to making the old analog Bird meter highly accurate is to mount the slugs in wood ...
I saw videos where they are modifying these old meters to add peak detection. Battery powered, op-amp. What these remotes sites are that people keep talking about. They must have simple modulation, able to break into the transmission line (shutting down the station), no need for precision or accuracy. Anytime I see them, they are on a desk with three or more attached in series with them.
I believe that the key to making the old analog Bird meter highly accurate is to mount the slugs in wood. Once you see the labor involved, you will understand why I charge $10,000.00 USD each. Anything else, it's just a Bird...
https://www.dhtrob.com/projecten/elna1.php
Do you get more smoke at the antenna if you measure it three times? Or are they taking an average to remove measurement uncertainty?
I put together more pricing options such as used Bird vs used Coaxial Dynamics and hp. Problem was I couldn't locate any used 2 - 30 MHz, 100W Bird elements. They are all either being hoarded, or the extra ones have been burned to a crisp by mis-use.
I believe that the key to making the old analog Bird meter highly accurate is to mount the slugs in wood. Once you see the labor involved, you will understand why I charge $10,000.00 USD each. Anything else, it's just a Bird...
https://www.dhtrob.com/projecten/elna1.php
Do you get more smoke at the antenna if you measure it three times? Or are they taking an average to remove measurement uncertainty?
It appears that, when CBers have one of their "shootouts", they don't poke the output of the "multi-pill" amplifier into any sort of power meter, they just use a Field Strength Meter situated some distance away!
I am always surprised by the following of AM CB in the USA---in Oz, it was regarded as the "beginner's mode", with most CBers drooling to buy SSB rigs.
The Tiny "rump" of HF CB in this country mainly seem to use CH35 LSB.
SSB doesn't quite lend itself to "shootouts" like AM!
Picture showing the backside radiation pattern off my two bean can waveguide at 2.52GHz measured with the LiteVNA. Maybe difficult to rotate a semi in a sphere but a quad with GPS could certainly make a basic sweep of it.