W7YV Ham Radio

Pulled the trigger on this on March 26, 2016 from Ham Radio Outlet. I have not been this excited in years! REFERENCES: http://www.qrpblog.com/2016/03/icom-ic-7300-review.html

This post relates to antenna analyzers useful to amateur radio operators. I will list my experiences with these in this article. Array Solutions AIM 4170 Link:  https://www.arraysolutions.com/Products/AIM4170.htm I don't recall what I paid for my AIM 4170. It is an older version and has been replaced with the AIM 4300 ($519). The AIM 4170 exceeded my expectations. It is well worth the price if you are doing any kind of antenna work or network characterization.  The software runs under Windows 7 and works very well. I have not tried to port it to Ubuntu. The following plot is from a balun I build back in '07. This plot is from an antenna feed balun I built. Here is a photo:

In a recent conversation about the need for a balun on a dipole fed with coax, the comment was made that no balun is needed because the dipole radiates in a balanced manner. Well, maybe... If a dipole is positioned above uniform ground and there are no trees, hills, fences, buildings, or powerline poles, then the statement above might be. However, the real world has trees, has hills, fences, wet and uneven ground, and powerline poles. It would be rare to have one side of a dipole driving the same free-space radiation impedance as the other side. If there is an unbalance, then the outer shield of the coax will radiate RF to make up the difference. An easy way to think of it is to imagine that one side of the dipole radiates 10 amps of RF and the other side radiates 9 amps due to the imbalance. The difference of 1 amp has to get made up. It gets radiated from the outside of the shield of the coax. Stated differently, the coax center conductor carries 10 amps. The inner shield carri...

Here are some photos from 2007 when I rewired a good part of my shack. See Webster's definition of  discombobulation . Discombobulation Starting Recombobulation In Process Recombobulation Complete

Overview These notes pertain to the installation and implementation of an SDR (Software-Defined Radio) on Linux and Windows-based machines. I was able to get the SDRPlay device installed for Windows and for Linux. Windows Installation Early on, my attempts to install SDR software on a Linux Ubuntu 14.04 machine failed due to, apparently, missing modules on the workstation. So, I decided that, if I could get it to run under Windows, it would prove that the device worked and would give me confidence that it could be installed under Linux. The Windows 7 Pro installation went well and I was able to get an SDR running in that OS. Linux Ubuntu 14.04 Installation Linux was tricky. The following links were useful to get this running: http://cubicsdr.com/ http://sdrplay.com/linux.html https://github.com/cjcliffe/CubicSDR/wiki/Build-Linux http://www.sdrplay.com/linux.html The order of the steps was not correct in the Build-Linux document. In short, the support...

Just pulled the trigger on my first Begali straight key.

Over the past few years, many SDR receivers have been put online and can be accessed over the Internet. This allows one to monitor the bands from receive locations far from the operator's local area. This is very useful to determine if your signal is getting into an area. I have used it to monitor the Wyoming Cowboy Net from an SDR receiver in Sedona, AZ ( http://w7rna.dyndns-remote.com:18901/ ). It occurred to me that one could use a remote SDR receiver to counter problems with local noise. In order to test this concept, I've installed two programs on my Ubuntu 14.04 Linux box, as follows: FLDIGI(1) - a powerful digital mode encoder/decoder program PULSE AUDIO VOLUME CONTROL(2) - a software package that allows one to direct audio from various sources to various outputs. Once these are installed, the web-based SDR receiver can be chosen from the site: websdr.org The audio produced by the web page is routed, using the Pulse Audio application, to the FLDIGI s...