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KD2ADL

Joined: Sat, Apr 4th 1998, 00:00 Roles: N/A Moderates: N/A

Latest Topics

Topic Created Posts Views Last Activity
HTs with direct frequency entry Sep 2nd 2013, 17:28 3 9,657 on 21/1/15
Zadig problems Jan 14th 2013, 17:28 8 23,455 on 8/6/13
DSP vs Filtering for better reception Jun 25th 2012, 15:45 4 7,330 on 26/6/12

Latest Posts

Topic Author Posted On
HTs with direct frequency entry KD2ADL on 2/9/13
Is there such a thing as an HT with direct frequency entry? By that I mean that you key in a frequency, and you are immediately monitoring that frequency and can transmit on its offset frequency. Every HT with which I am familiar (and I am by means an expert) requires that a frequency be programmed into a memory location, something often more easily done with software than with pushing buttons.

To me the advantage of direct frequency entry is the ability to quickly and temporarily use a repeater while travelling, or quickly shift to a mutually agreed simplex channel after making contact. But I don't know of any radios which offer this capability. Are there any?
QST Digital Version - Got to be a better way KB2HF on 14/3/13
Nate, I wasn't suggesting commercial distribution, just friendly "would you mind passing along your QSTs to me, you know I'd love to join ARRL but money's a little tight now..." kind of redistribution. Watermarks won't help here.

I share your view about not assisting freeloaders. I used to bring my old copies of QST to our radio club meetings, but then I decided that folks who are sufficiently interested in the hobby to join a club ought to be paying members of the League. That's when I started dropping them off at the library.

I also agree that HQ should talk a bit about the decision-making behind the selection of nxtbook technology; maybe a topic for one of Harold Kramer's Inside HQ columns.
What to do with a dish network dish?a KC9UNY on 11/3/13
Is there any creative way to use a Dish antenna as the basis for an HF antenna? Developments with CC&Rs must allow satellite tv antennas by federal law, so I am wondering if anyone has tried using the framework of the Dish antenna as the basis for, say, a spiral-wound long wire stealth antenna.
QST Digital Version - Got to be a better way KB2HF on 11/3/13
I'm sure that the reason they don't do PDFs is security; those PDFs would be going out to fellow hams who choose not to join ARRL. For those of you with iPads, there is a QST app, but it suffers even more from the same fuzziness and slowness to load criticized here on the PC version.

I find the online version only really useful for one thing. I prefer not to keep my old QSTs, so I have in the past copied interesting articles and then passed them on. Now I don't have to copy stuff out of the magazine, I can just print the pages of interest. The paper copies go to our local library's magazine exchange table, where perhaps they may inspire someone who always wanted to be a ham to study up and join us.
Zadig problems KD2ADL on 17/1/13
I found my own solution, and thought that I would post it here in case anyone else stumbles across this thread. Basically, the report of a trojan in the USB installer that Zadig created is a false positive (see discussion, including results of an Avira staff test of the file, at http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=50F3EEFB.2010006%40gmx.de&forum_name=libwdi-devel). Turn Avira off, run Zadig, then turn it back on again.

I picked up an inexpensive DVB-T dongle from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008BQV25M/ref=oh_details_o04_s00_i00 but it is now out of stock) which was shipped directly from Shenzen, China. I plugged it in to a Gateway Netbook running XP, ran the script referred to in the article, installed the driver, and then ran SDR#.

I used the tiny TV antenna which shipped with the dongle, but heard nothing at first, even after tuning to powerful local FM stations (using the WFM setting) and to our local NOAA weather radio station (using NFM). Nosing around SDR#, I noticed a Configure button at the top, clicked that, and found an RF gain control turned, by default, all the way down (!?!). As soon as I moved the slider about halfway, I started picking up FM and weather broadcasts. I never had so much fun for such a small investment; my dongle was $20 and I spent another $7 on a PAL-to-BNC adapter for the antenna. Incidentally, my dongle's PID and VID don't exactly match any of the products on the list of dongles known to work, and the description in Zadig was RTL2832U, not "Bulk-in, interface" as described in the rtlsdr.org guide to Windows software. My takeaway is that this is an area where being a little adventurous pays off.

W9RAN, thanks for inspiring me to pursue this.

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