Quote:
Originally Posted by EscapeVelocity
Well, I readily acknowledge there are far more knowledgable people than me when it comes to antenna theory and design, and I like learning from them (and I mean lots-ham radio folks especially).
I bow to your superior antenna knowledge.
That being said, I have much more hands on experience with indoor tv antennas than just about anybody around.
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Funny how we all know lots of people smarter than us. I read the stuff in UHF antenna thread and admire the knowledge and keep learning. Of all the hard core antenna types I rate myself in the B+ category with a lot of people above me on the ladder.
I could not sit down and design a TV antenna, but I can guess really close what someone else was doing when they built it. I have all my life in many jobs been in some no man's land between being a technician and engineer.
So save your bows to those smarter than me whose material I have read all my life and learned.
The older ham radio folks. I am finding fewer and fewer people in that hobby that lead the edge any more. Actually for quite some time. I haven't been on the air since the very early 90's. As myself and other's tried to get ham radio into the digital world back then, we hit brick walls of older timers wanting to do the old way only. I see from reading my current QSTs little has changed. A lot of the death sentence for hams to go any farther in digital also was loosing 220 to 222 MHz. We had proposals to run very wide stuff in there to get speeds up. We already had enough bandwidth there for 9600 baud and had started building it out when we lost the bottom of that band. We had plans to apply for STAs to use wider signals to at least get up to 28kbaud similar to a telephone modem. We needed that band because no one used it, and we could run wide signals there. Plus there were few people into the high speed stuff so we needed something that had 100 mile range to move data even if only at night. We had plans for using microwaves for much much faster data as it caught on and it was possible to take many more shorter hops between people's houses, etc.
It all died. Digital is still used mainly for DX spotting and passing Health and Welfare traffic, and it's state of the art is stuck circa 1990.
The new thing is memorize the test, go buy a Japanese radio and antenna and call that seat of the pants.
I have seriously though of putting back up only dipole and simple wire antennas and polishing my CW back to a decent speed. Many of the experimenters now "hide" down in the CW parts of the band.
Another place that actually seems more interesting to me is there are also experimenters in the VHF and UHF band running not FM, handhelds or repeaters and phone patches, but Single Side Band and CW running antennas very similar to they type we discuss here. I did it in the past and keep swearing I should buy another 2 meter SSB rig to get started again. It's pretty amazing how far you can talk on 10 to 25 watts PEP with a long boom yagi on 144 MHz just 20 ft up. Here is FL nightly distance is 100 miles plus. 144MHz is wild as even E-skip gets up that high one or twice a year if you are lucky enough to be on the band. I have worked people out 900 miles on 146 MHz, so I know it's possible. Oh the people that play with satellites tend to be a unique crowd as well, and I tried it but it wasn't my style.
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Now that said!! Yes, everywhere I have looked on the net, EV is the man with the most experience on indoor antlers! You are also the man to take on the new Chinese beams, because I really think they are the new indoor antennas that may very well even solve some of the "I live in an apartment and can't get no VHF blues" crowd. Seriously....
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