New to me old SUV. The dash and center console doesn't exactly lend itself to radio mounting. Is anyone running radios in one of these things? At this point I'm thinking some sort of remote head unit might be the best bet, with the radio under the seat, but open to suggestions.
I'm itching to do some satellite work, but currently off my feet with an injury. I was able to receive the ISS with my dual band omni, but have not yet tried to transmit. I was on the hunt for budget rotator, but even the budget ones are well out of my tax bracket. The QFH antennas recently popped up on my radar, and look like they might be just the ticket. Is anyone regularly working satellites with these? How do they compare to a cheap HT and an Arrow dual band linear antenna? I'm guessing they might be very close in performance, given that the QFH antennas are circular polarization, and I'll be running a 50w base radio with good sensitivity and a preamp.
I have a unique situation, that I have a large yard, and can get away with things in trees, but can't dig or put down radials. I've been playing with models of elevated quarter wave antennas with quarter wave radials sloping away from the antenna at 45*. On paper this provides about 2dB more gain 5* above the horizon than a ground mounted quarter wave. Are there any gotchas? Anyone running an antenna this way?
I recently purchased this radio with the idea of having a dual purpose portable rig. A lightweight(ish) 100w radio for POTA, as well as a compact high power VHF/UHF rig for satellite work. The ability to CAT control the frequencies was something I was looking forward to. Now that I have the thing hooked up with rigctld and GPredict, it seems that there are some shortcomings. GPredict is talking to rigctld, which in turn does tune the radio. I can enable doppler tracking and the VFO does indeed change. My issue is that when I attempt to set GPredict to update both the uplink and downlink (VFO A and B), things get wonky.
If I set the radio up as simplex in GPredict (it is of course a simplex radio), GPredict will only update VFO A. If I set it as a FDX radio, GPredict will update both VFO A and B, but not consistently, and if I key up to transmit, it'll switch me back and forth between VFO A and B as it updates for doppler shift.
Is anyone successfully controlling a 706 with GPredict, or any other satellite tracking software? At this point I'm not sure if these are GPredict bugs, or the CAT interface on the radio not playing nice with what I'm trying to do.
It was pretty cool to be able to receive the ISS downlink from the omni on my back porch, I just need to figure out how to get things stable before I try transmitting.
I remember when I got my first Pixel, I think it was a 3, the image stabilization was mind blowing. I could point the phone through the windshield of a moving car on a rough road, and the image was absolutely perfect, no bouncing, no wobbling, just a stable easy to view video. Now with my Pixel 10, I'm recording a video of an object on my desk, and even with image stabilization set to "Active", every little movement is caught by the video. Am I missing a setting somewhere?
A few people in our club have these, but their bases are corroding when left outside. Since I'm planning to do a lot of POTA on the beach, I'm thinking of 3d printing a base, and embedding 316 stainless hardware. For those of you who use these regularly, what could be made better? What would make them better specifically for beach use?