Re: popular bands
By: Greystripe to Xucaen on Tue Nov 24 2015 12:41 am
I'm over in Scotland - I mostly do VHF and UHF packet stuff, but I've been known to do a bit of QRP HF.
I do a small amount of VHF+, but I get bored with it pretty quickly, so it comes in waves every six months or so. At some point, I'll start trying satellite stuff, and expect that to last for a month or tow (but maybe it'll last longer).
I'm not a fan of the 'big' bands, 20M and the like, as I tend to find I get shouted over by contesters. I tend to chill out on the warc bands when I get a chance to sling everything up - it's getting cold now so I'll be back inside packeting for winter!
I've just gotten an order of a bunch of "stuff" so I'll be putting up a doublet in the next few days. I build a trap dipole some years ago that worked well enough, but it's degraded to uselessness now. I look forward to a post-mortem, but expect the doublet fed with window line to put some pep back in my antenna system.
I do like the "big" bands when there's not a contest going on, and tend to toss a few contacts into the bigger contests when the bands start drying up. Never really pushed myself in a contest though.
For packet stuff, I mostly run a yaesu ft-7900 with either soundmodem or a tnc-x connected, and I use the linux ax.25 stack with uronode as my access for others.
I use an FT-736R for all my VHF+ stuff... I've got a KAM that I use for packet.
I've been known to use one of the cheap Baofeng handhelds for packet too, but it's definitely more hassle!
I have a UV-B5 for casual operating when away from home, but my HTX-202 and HTX-404 are what I use when I'm at Hamvention or anywhere else that will have a lot of close-in signals. I may have ran packet through the HTX-202 once, but never the Baofeng.
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