r/amateurradio

During the tornado outbreak in the midwest last week, I discovered that my brand new weather radio had awful reception. The telescopic monopole was inconsistent depending where I would walk in my apartment. The poor reception messed with the SAME headers enough that a severe thunderstorm watch set it off as an "unknown warning". It was also fairly unintelligible with poor SNR.

Looks like garbage, but $20 in parts and an hour of my time was well spent. I'm particularly amazed that the cheap chinesium adapters and ferrites actually worked. If I knew that, I might have spent more time making it look nice. Oh well, I have the parts to make a rev 2.

I threw on ferrites to choke CM currents and keep the feedline from interacting too much... Fine tuning was achieved by coiling the extra length at the ends. According to my Nano VNA, calibrated just before the adapters, this was very close to 73 ohms real j0 ohms imaginary.

Now the reception is rock solid, intelligible and no differences in SNR when walking around.

Next, I should stop procrastinating and get my Ham license.

Hi looking at selling my old Xiegu x6100 and thought I would power on and test before listing, I plugged a dummy load into the Xiegu and monitored ssb 20m on my Yaesu FT101d and the noises baffled me.

Anybody able to tell me what the strange sounds are that are being recieved by my Yaesu, the Xiegu power meter also fluctuates whilst keying down ssb without any voice or audio?

My guess is RFI getting into the microphone, placing a small ferritin block on the cable didnt help the issue.

Check out the video I've recorded.

Thanks in advance,

Josh

As you can see the oscillator is transmitting on the receive frequency for some reason.Tried improving ground and shielding inside with copper foil but no luck

As a (~40 year old) 20 year Extra, mentor to literally dozens of students and new hams now, and 15 year Redditor (all 15 right here, including as a mod once upon a time), believe me, I get it. Seeing the same questions cluttering your feed constantly gets old.

At the same time, we get posts all the time (often correctly) claiming that the hobby has a lot of barriers to entry, not least of all negativity from the people in the hobby. Downvoting well-intentioned but repetitive or simple (to you) questions just contributes to that perception.

It’s easy as a OM to forget that newbies don’t know what they don’t know. It can be bloody hard to google answers to technical questions when your technical vocabulary is limited, and the US exam material, and format, and most of the available study material, does little to encourage depth of learning during the licensing process. Add to that the rapidly declining quality of online information sources thanks to SEO, AI, ad bias, and rage baiting, along with increasingly weak STEM education in an lot of schools, and one can imagine that learning this stuff can be a daunting prospect these days, just in a different way from the old days when I got licensed.

I’d like to offer this classic XKCD in hopes of encouraging folks who downvote those newbie and repetitive questions by default to, if not upvote, at least just ignore them and let other folks answer, rather than burying them, or worse, belittling OP.

For those that already just keep turning the scroll wheel, or especially those who take the time to answer these questions, I’d like to say thank you.

I can say with some confidence, given 2 decades of experience, that there is very little that fosters your own enthusiasm and enjoyment (and depth of knowledge) of a hobby more than fostering the same in others. Twice I’ve been more or less inactive for years, only to be pulled back into the hobby by a chance encounter with a total newbie who’s so excited about it that they’re like a golden retriever puppy cracked out on Red Bull.

Yeah, it gets old explaining common mode current for the 10th time, but even if you’re like me and took your test back in the code requirement days and had to read the whole ARRL licensing manual because there was no alternative, you were still that clueless noob once upon a time. Even if you came into the hobby with an EE degree, you had to learn new terminology, and new rules.

If you had a great elmer, remember and try to emulate the patience and kindness they showed you. If you had to go it alone, or met with negativity from us crotchety old buggers, remember the frustration you felt, and try to do better for the next guy.

This hobby doesn’t work without people to communicate with, and it is probably changing faster right now than at any point since the development of AM voice communication. At the same time, information availability is fragmenting, search engines are riding an SEO handcart straight to hell, and online communities are increasingly negative. I hear people say “ham radio is the original social network” all the time. I hope you’ll join me in trying to channel those old school roots, rather than the flood of negativity that has engulfed all the other social networks.

I've been getting increasingly erratic readings from my NanoVNA over the last month. I initially chalked it up to a bad connector or cable, because I'm hell on RG316, and it's been pretty intermittent. So I cut off and replaced every BNC in the county over the last 2 weeks and even updated the firmware just in case. But the nanoVNA would still work just enough to make me think that it might not be the issue.

Well, I'm calling it after today. It kept giving me nonsensical readings while setting up my new 6m omni. I checked the balun to make sure it was good, and it showed only 6db of common mode suppression, while I know it from past experience that it's good for 25-ish db.

So I ran an SWR sweep on a known-good 40-10 EFHW, and it gave me the the results in the pic above. I guess now I gotta decide if I want to get another NanoVNA or a RigExpert.

R.I.P. Aursinc NanoVNA-H, 2023-2026. We hardly knew ye.

I wanted to buy one of K6ARK’s mini transformer kits to build a 9:1 random wire antenna for my Elecraft KH1, but they were sold out.

But I can buy toroids, magnet wire, and BNC connectors! I 3D printed a spacer to lift the toroid just off the BNC pins, and I printed a little strain relief plate for the wire.

Soldered the ground side of the BNC first, inserted the spacer (notice the notch on one side), soldered the center pin with the spacer in place, stack the toroid on the spacer, solder a little PolyStealth to the magnet wire, run it through the strain relief plate, stuff a bunch of hot glue inside and heat-shrink it all together.

With 35.5’ of wire, a bit of 2mm rope, and tiny little weight, if I happen to have a tree at a park or summit, I can get up a better radiator than the 4’ whip. No need for an extra counterpoise, as the KH1 already has one.

And the answer is "sort of!" I could just about make out the carrier (almost at the noise floor) early yesterday with a 7ft dish and wideband LNA. I saw some nice recordings of it when it was closer to Earth, but my angles were never quite right to get much during the initial orbit.
Video about my attempts here: https://youtu.be/_0U7ljvHIhY

Hi Reddit! I’m a ham radio operator (OK1PNK) and a solo developer. I’ve always loved the 'randomness' of radio—the ability to just key up and talk to someone nearby.

I spent the last month or two building Ketska. It’s a real-time voice app designed for privacy and local connections.

The "Why":

Every app today wants your email, your phone number, and your soul. I wanted the opposite.

What makes it unique:

• 0% Friction: No 'Sign in with Google', no forms. You open the app, and you're on the air.
• Blurred Privacy: I’ve implemented 'Blurred Location' (250m offset). You see people in your area to talk to, but nobody knows exactly where you live.
• Real-Time: High-quality, low-latency audio built on LiveKit.

The "Cold Start" Problem:

Building a social app as a solo dev is hard. Right now, the map is a bit of a ghost town. It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem: people join, see no one to talk to, and leave.

I’m looking for early adopters, radio nerds, hikers, or just curious people to help me break the silence. I want Ketska to be a place where you can find a local 'signal' without giving up your privacy.

I’d love to get some 'signal reports' from you guys! What features are missing? Is the UI intuitive?

Links:

• App Store (iOS)
• Google Play (Android)
• Web Version

73s!

I was asked to show my new foot switch that I said I would make.

I gutted an old guitar tuner and I had to hot glue the lcd in place. I gutted one of the power jacks for the wire pass through and glued it as well. I need to add some non-skid something to the bottom to keep it from being so easy to slide on the floor and two simple plastic plugs to replace the 1/4” females I removed from the sides, but it is fully functional and very pleasant to press.

Enjoy!

Aethersdr. Great new software for Flexradio

Got a new radio today for my birthday and it needed a little protection. Thought the leather classed it up a bit.

preparing to make this radio into an artistic experience of sound and touch, manipulating the cats whisker to find some signal in the aether with this crystal reciever. a feast of resonance and non-linearity

on show in august 2026

loe feijs & ralf jacobs, 2026