@philpem to be fair, Yaesu's 1990s radios looked like they belonged in the cold war.
@kilroy_was_here @Spud_Coolzip The solution, unfortunately, is likely to either move the radio further from the screen, or get lucky with another screen that is extremely well shielded. Adding some ferrites to the monitor's power lead might help a little, but will still benefit from distance. I have almost the same issue with some under-counter LED lights. The wall wart needs to be a few feet away or better.
@kilroy_was_here @Spud_Coolzip Maybe we were misunderstanding each other. The closeness and the fact that your multi-meter goes off both indicate the RF is in the audio frequency range (double or triple digit Hz) rather than the medium wave radio frequencies. That would potentially get into the radio right before the audio amplifier stage and overwhelm the audio. Also, love the look of those SANGEANs.
@kilroy_was_here @Spud_Coolzip It sounds like the interference is happening in the audio frequency stages of your AM radio, rather than RF. Have you tried other radio receivers? It might just be a poorly shielded radio that needs to be kept a distance from noisy electronics. 75Hz "noise" shouldn't propagate very far without an extremely large "antenna" to to work with.
@r2d3522 #POTA (and folks like @qrper selling it) has, IMHO, done more for the hobby &, ironically, Morse in a few years than the #ARRL has in decades.
Good for you for spreading the "gospel" of radio!
After work, I take the backpack with the shack, and settle down in a public park in town. This park is in a working-class neighborhood.
A young black man of barely 20 years old asks me (the white old man), what I do. I explain. We chat.
9 QSOs later for me, and a few spliffs for him and his friends, I come back to him to tell him that I had Brazil at 8000 km.
And we talk a lot about #hamradio. We even adjust the antenna with a NanoVNA,
We ended up doing a series of licence exam questions so that he understands that if he wants, he can pass the license quite easily.
I hear old farts criticizing the #POTA. This evening was amazing . Really.
@tek_dmn As far as YSF vs other digital voice modes. Your best bet is to look at what is common locally. You can use any of them to link into whatever via a hotspot, but if you have a local digital repeater, you will need THAT mode to use it.
@tek_dmn It's very much of a cool Swiss army knife that does many things, but has some shortcomings you should be aware of too.
1. You will need to study the manual and play a LOT to get everything. It's not intuitive.
2. Shortwave is AM only, and has very poor sensitivity. It's kind of an "also does" thing like the crappy scissors on your Swiss Army knife. A $100 tecsun will blow it out of the water.
3. APRS for GPS tracking works fairly well. It's reception of APRS packets isn't the best.
@youseeatortoise @martennorr Love these maps! The choices hurt my brain though. Lake superior is almost 200m above sea level, and it's inundated, yet parts of FL that sit a few meters above sea level are islands? The worst case scenario for the great lakes isn't sea inundation, it's drought causing them to drop. Still, thanks for sharing. Fun to look over.
@LeftistLawyer There's nothing about GPS technology that requires any sort of tracking, cellular plans, planned obsolescence or any other sort of enshitification. Those things are all add-ons. GPS is a receive only technology, and a nav system requires updating maps every few years somehow, which can be done on your home wifi. It can be built-in and just as simple and robust as an old Garmin.
@salubrium@mstdn.party If you can hear it but cannot open it, then you are likely within 10db of working. Going to a decent antenna, like a 1/4 wave ground plane or j-pole up high will often do it.
@IU1KGS That, and all the Versa Tuners are fantastic tuners for the money. Only 2 caveats. First, always open them up and look over all the solder connections with a magnifying glass for bad joints (these are really nice and spacious inside, really, take a look!). Second, don't use that 4:1 balun. It's garbage. Too small a torroid and a crappy voltage wiring make it basically useless. There's lots of space to replace it with a better balun as a future project though.
@HopelessDemigod @kilroy_was_here I would use the "3% critical" column in that chart. Lots of amateur transceivers transmit poorly at a 10% voltage drop. Then again, How often would you be drawing 100A? Designing to perform optimally at 50A, and "just" safely at 100A would be fine in most cases.
@salubrium@mstdn.party It's fairly difficult to get a good measure of the SWR of a HT antenna because of the widely varying ground plane. You could say that placing it on a real groundplane might be more accurate measure of the antenna, but then you are not simulating the actual real-world application of the antenna. If you place it directly on the VNA, the ground plane isn't going to be the same as holding an HT either. Happy to hear what other hams settled on as "good enough"
@Steve
Did you watch the recent Climate Town video about the push to use natural gas as the "bridge fuel" between dirtier fossil fuels and renewables? It talks about this whole thing. Really interesting.
https://youtu.be/K2oL4SFwkkw?si=sR76y9ekwjPZ8nGj
@ve3mal @susankayequinn
@RosaRossa@kolektiva.social While that's great, not everyone can work from home and not everyone can get to work by bike or public transportation. And transportation is an important sector but not the only one by any means. @ve3mal