[time-nuts] Amatuer Radio Information

[Matthew D. Fuller]

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)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.