Been going all over the place today. I started around 5am and modified Chang Puak's Yagi-Uda calculator to suit my needs. I needed to add elements and his first calculator had that, but didn't show dipole length and his new one didn't allow for adding elements. So I merged the two a bit. Can be seen here.
The next thing I did was a little work at the job before going to Fry's. As I had mentioned in a previous post I had purchased a SDR dongle. So I needed adapters to split my signal from my second j-pole so that my bearcat and this SDR dongle has an antenna to work with. If I haven't mentioned before everything I am running right now is using RG6 because I have allot of it, it's all I have and I'm really really poor. On the receiving side I would in theory think this would be a boon as the RG6 acts like capacitive storage, but I could be wrong. On my transmitter side It's not good, but I am getting 1.5:1 on the standing wave on 145.330, so it's not all bad.
I have found that the bad apples on air can be a little discouraging to the hobby, but I have a plan for that. The afore mentioned Yagi-Uda calculator was modified so I can build one for myself. It needed it to be quick to deploy and easily portable. I'm currently 3D printing some bungs to hold the elements solidly, and then I will start installing the GPS/compass board. In the end with the SDR dongle, my GPS/Compass board and the trigger. I will only need two good solid transmissions to figure out whose playing the stupid game. Ultimately deciding on whether to take care of it old school or just blast the address and tags everywhere. I know there are two people do it. One that is solid and close and one that thinks their quick keys are not enough time to lock onto. Time will tell.
I also picked up some SMA to BNC adapters to have a BNC on my Baofeng HT. The SMA is just too small, hard to change out and breaks way too easy. Not to mention most real HT's have BNC and not SMA.
I'll post some pictures later this afternoon. I gotta snooze for a bit and then mow the lawn hopefully for the last time this year. 73
