Wire Dipole antenna
Working with the radio at my mother and fathers place is much more successful than at home. The fact that it’s about 60KMs from the city helps. And it’s nice to spend a night in a place without light pollution is really nice.
Anyway Hannah and I set up a basic wire dipole antenna, 10 meters side to side, and strung it up around the decking out the back of my parents place.
This antenna cost us the grand cost of under $5AUD nice and cheap.
Anyway during the daylight hours, we listened in to the 20 and 40 meter bands, even picking up KE6M from california, which was kinda cool.
At night the 40 Meters seemed almost unusable as there was a lot of AM stuff emanating from China, and also a repeating noise that could of been an over the horizon radar system also from China.
But 80 Meters was fairly active, and we filled many pages of my little log book with stuff we found interesting. One of the cool things was a couple of guys talking about how to build decent chokes and baluns from stuff in their junk boxes.
A good day all in all.
I so need to get myself licensed so I can start transmitting.
~Ivy
Excellent stuff!
I keep meaning to get my radio licence too, but being in the CBD there isn’t a lot of scope to put up antennae so I’d be stuck on a hand-held, which isn’t a lot of motivation.
On a similar note, did you know that the 477Mhz class licensed ‘UHF’ band has two channels assigned for unlicensed data use these days?
Andre.
Oh there is still much one can do in an Apartment. and a wire dipole is quite easy to construct.
depending how much room one has, there are even internal antennas one can use that are quite good.
The only issue with the CBD is radio noise.
And I didn’t know that 477MHz had open bands for data, could be quite fun.
~Ivy
Hello,
It’s great to see new people so interested in ham radio.
Ham Radio has been a life long hobby for me. You mentioned Ed KE6M, I was on frequency with him (14.245Mhz) last night 04:00-07:00Z August 1, 2008. There were many VK stations on, a few Hawaiian and New Zealand and even DU9/KE0Q from the Philippines was on. This was my second week with Ed and his South Pacific groups. He is on every Tuesday & Thursday (Wednesday and Friday your time) about the same time.
Hope to hear you on the air from VK land soon.
73, Joe k0ivk in Missouri