Just to hit one point... On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 09:37:51AM -0600 I heard the voice of J. Mike Needham, and lo! it spake thus: > > As far as equipment is concerned, I am on a tight budget and so it > will likely be eBay and Craigslist, but I am not sure what I need > these days. > [...] > I need an antenna that would be the least obtrusive and not mounted > in a permanent fashion to the building.
An antenna can never be too good. But don't underestimate what you can do with a really bad one. Several years ago, I finally got around to getting on HF, and I lived in an apartment at the time. I used a Small Wonder Labs 30 meter transciever you build for about $100 (mod a few tools etc you should have around anyway), which put out about 900 mW. That went through the cheapest manual tuner I could buy, and into ~100 feet of wire which was taped up one wall, across the ceiling, around a corner, up the stairs, looped around a room, down a vertical wall, across another wall... the first contact that landed was something like 850 miles away. Same antenna, with a standard commercial transceiver and ~20 watts (wouldn't want to go higher, what with my head and computer and all being about 2 feet from the antenna) crossed both oceans. Pretty bad setup, really. But it worked. So don't get too hung up on finding the perfect 8-} N3TZJ -- Matthew Fuller (MF4839) | [email protected] Systems/Network Administrator | http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/ On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
