Thanks guys!
I appreciate your feedback and your encouragement!
Yes like any hobby this can be expensive.... or not. While I do like fancy new things, I also really enjoy fiddling around and trying things out. Had to design a lot of Physics labs when I was teaching and enjoyed trying new ways of doing things- which always involved measuring things. Over the years the equipment and data processing software got better and better, but we don't learn much if everything is done for us. Nor do we appreciate how much it is doing for us if we haven't done more of the work ourselves.
I am still working on the technician study materials. That's going well. If I schedule the exam for the first opportunity it would be the 2nd week in April.
I have been reading a lot on the web and watching eBAY prices and finding some other used equipment sites as well.
I read something that goes along with my line of thought. The people in that conversation said that many beginners find VHF far less interesting than HF and many of them never go for their general and drop out. I think they were suggesting that giving 28.3-28.5 MHz voice to technicians might have been intended to help remedy this. My own line of thought is that I KNOW I want a decent receiver for the SW and HF spectrum because I have enjoyed listening there in the past. Mostly international broadcasts. I remember the first time I listened to Radio Moscow - back in the 60s during the "cold war" - and then listened to the Voice of America and really saw for the first time how each side can propagandize the news.
Anyway, my first priority was to have a 2m radio I can use after getting my tech license, so I did a lot of watching and looking. At the same time I have also been steadily watching VHF transceivers and highly rated broadband HF receivers on eBAY. I know I want a receiver, but will only need a transceiver for HF if I continue on for my General license. That remains unknown, though it is my intention.
I found that a brand new Yaesu FT2800 at Ham Radio Outlet was going for less than used ones at eBAY. In one case the eBAY plus shipping was $50 more. (HRO charged no shipping). So I picked up that FT2800. It is meant to be installed in a car and run off a 13.8 V car battery. So it requires a power supply. I noticed that some less expensive HF transceivers also require similar Voltage and Amperage so I bought a Daiwa 330 power supply and found a new one of those for $20 less it costs at most sites.
Both of those arrived early this week and I made that 2m antenna I mentioned in a previous post in this thread:
2 METER ANTENNAS - CHEAP AND EASY!. I used coax from the radio to a pair of 19" tv antennas soldered to the coax, one to center and one to the mesh layer.
I strung this outside on my balcony and mounted it on a long 1/2" dowel rod. During the day the antenna hides under the awning of my porch swing. I seems to function okay there, but I don't have much of a way to compare it to anything yet. Under the cover of night, I can slide the dowel rod out to extend further out beyond the balcony railing.
I was glad to find I could "lock out" ONLY the PTT button on hand mike on this radio because a lot of the scanning controls are duplicated on buttons on the transmitter. To INITIATE any scanning REQUIRES using the hand microphone buttons. So I can use it without having to worry about accidentally pressing the PTT button.
I really like the clean audio of this 2800. The squelch is a little weak for my tastes though. There is a RF squelch too, but this early in my experimenting with the radio I don't want to cut off the weakest signals.
The first night I did tune in one of the weaker NOAA stations instead of a strong one, and moved the antenna around in various ways. I watched the signal strength display on the radio display as I moved it around, and listened as well. I found one direction in which there as a narrow "dead zone" - with nothing coming in. I later found the local police stations do not come in well when the antenna is pointed in that direction. In some directions it seemed that the antenna worked better when both of the tv antenna rods were in a horizontal plane. But that did not seem to be true for signals at other frequencies.
Last night I was thinking that the coax alone is around 5m long and might work as a long wire antenna for the old Lafayette on HF - as a 1/4 wave or 1/2 wave - using just the center line. (Even with the tv antenna soldered to the end of it, it's still around 5 or 6m. So I tried it on the Lafayette - mostly as a way to see if that would give me any more information about that antenna - even if not for the 144MHz FT2800.
I found that keeping my original long wire on one antenna terminal of the Lafayette, and the center wire of the "coax 2m antenna" to the other antenna terminal gave the best results. I tried it with just one at a time and then with both. With both, there was a definite boost to the signal to noise ratio immediately each time I added it. I scanned from 6MHz to 30MHz but did not spend a long time with it. The long wire did a little better by itself for HF than the "2m coax" - but we would expect that. The 2m by itself, worked pretty well, but not as good. But together, one to each antenna terminal was clearly the best. It's nice that these results do not contradict what I expected, and even nicer that the coax antenna added something to the HF reception.
So I have been having fun. Some of the radio books I have ordered have been arriving. Practical circuit ideas in several books by Doug Demaw (W1FB) and one by Ian Poole. One thing that has especially impressed me is how well these guys know the practical side of choosing components for various applications!!! All my training has been more "textbook-ish" without paying much attention to ferrite vs iron core inductors or ceramic versus tantulum and everything else. My education focused on tuning frequency equations, impedance calculations and those sorts of things. Useful now yes, but I am totally lacking in knowing these practical things about why one would NOT choose a particular TYPE of inductor or capacitor!
....... So... while I have not posted here for a while, I have been doing fine and enjoying myself a lot!
Thanks again for sharing your ideas and for giving me encouragement!
