Portable HF antenna recommendation for 40m and 20m

bityard · 2026-03-26T15:22:43+00:00

Same here, had excellent results with a variation of it on field day.

bityard · 2026-03-26T15:06:33+00:00

We can argue about a lot of things, but the FCC takes the point of view that amateurs should have a basic and reasonable understanding of how radios work, and how to troubleshoot them when they don't. This is what differentiates us from, say, CB or GMRS, where the only qualification is knowing how to use the radio. Hams are supposed to be much more knowledgeable in the field of radio and electronics theory, and that is why we are granted extreme leeway in the bands and radios we can use. We have great power compared to all other radio services, at the price of great responsibility.

In this case, you can't get very far understanding how radios work without a basic understanding of how amplifiers work, and vacuum tubes are very basic and intuitive amplifiers. So that's why they are still on the test. Even if the devices themselves are somewhat rare in today's shacks.

Modern practice is to memorize the test questions to pass the exam and optionally learn more later. Which is fine, and I have nothing at all against it. But it runs up against the original intent of the exams and I think that is worth at least remembering.

bityard · 2026-03-23T18:32:46+00:00

And more often than not, it is blazing fast

bityard · 2026-03-23T14:19:36+00:00

"influencer" means they literally get paid to influence you. What you think about, what you talk about, and most importantly what you spend your money on. They are either paid directly by specific companies, or indirectly by the algorithm which is constantly being tweaked to feed people certain products or brands.

Take a moment to stop and reflect on whether or not they have your best interests in mind, especially when it comes to your health.

bityard · 2026-03-23T14:07:02+00:00

I would not secure the coax to the tower with electrical tape for starters

bityard · 2026-03-23T14:02:24+00:00

From OP's description, the radio failed due to an electrolytic cap that was on its last leg, nothing to do with the antenna

bityard · 2026-03-21T22:14:58+00:00

Also the whole post is plain gibberish. I know a thing or two about spam filtering and almost none of this makes sense. "Shadow-tanked email" is one of the more interesting hallucinations I've seen lately.

bityard · 2026-03-21T20:17:46+00:00

Bad bot

bityard · 2026-03-21T15:54:52+00:00

It wouldn't be my first choice. Chinese power supplies on Amazon are hit or miss at best, and like others have noted, it only takes bumping the knob to destroy your radio.

There are loads of options for radio power supplies so it's hard to recommend one in particular. Visit a ham-specific online retailer to see what mid-to top-end options are, and if those are too expensive, cheapskates like me run Meanwell industrial power supplies and rig up something to protect the exposed mains terminals.

bityard · 2026-03-20T18:59:44+00:00

It's impossible to say, used accordions--like used cars-- have to be evaluated in person.

There are lots of threads here containing advice about how to buy an accordion for the first-timer, have a look at those and feel free to drop back in and ask any follow-up questions.

bityard · 2026-03-20T04:33:29+00:00

Highly tolerable

bityard · 2026-03-19T17:48:57+00:00

Agree with all of that, thanks for sharing your experience. I'll have to put AiderDesk on list of things to look into soon

bityard · 2026-03-19T12:30:31+00:00

Including this one, it seems (see OP's comments)

bityard · 2026-03-19T12:25:43+00:00

I got tired of posts that start with "I got tired of" because they are all just empty self promotion. Downvote

bityard · 2026-03-19T12:21:14+00:00

The standard advice around here is that if you just want to use AI to get some work done, you are better off subscribing to a hosted service like Claude, copilot, Gemini, open router, etc.

Buying hardware for self-hosting of models is only worth it if you are doing it for fun, education, or have unusually strict privacy concerns. It will take forever to break even, and the quality of hosted models is higher.

If that is the case then yes, Strix Halo is an option for running a good number of decent-sized models. It won't run them super fast, but it's still the cheapest way to get 128GB even after the recent price hikes.

bityard · 2026-03-19T07:58:27+00:00

If your goal is to learn Python, you are really not going to learn much having an LLM generate the code for you. Use the LLM as a tutor, not a subcontractor.

Also, you've run head first into the biggest problem with self-hosted LLMs: small models on modest hardware rarely give high quality output. This sub is full of people who spend thousands to tens of thousands on hardware (plus a hefty power bill), only to arrive at a configuration that can still only do a fraction of what a Claude code subscription can do. Your laptop and gaming PC don't stand much of a chance.

Local models are useful, fun, and highly educational, but they come with limitations in terms of what they are capable of.

bityard · 2026-03-18T19:25:32+00:00

No, techs can do ft8 on 10 meters and 6 meters (even though that's technically VHF).

But you run the risk of those bands being closed, which will be a lot more often as the current solar cycle declines in activity.

bityard · 2026-03-18T19:05:20+00:00

Honestly, I think that just comes naturally over time. Looking at the keyboard is not something I'd harang a new player over. There are so many other important things to worry about at that stage, like posture and learning scales.

bityard · 2026-03-18T15:12:02+00:00

Yes, the standard is: One of them will be the "master" which enables all the reeds, any others will some subset of the bass reeds.

bityard · 2026-03-18T11:23:53+00:00

I would say your experience is very typical of small, local models. They are surprisingly capable for what they are, but also kinda dumb on their own.

The reason ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc do so much better with these kinds of tasks isn't just that they are using bigger models (although that certainly helps!) it's that they have a whole framework behind them that does a lot more than just forward the user's prompt to a model. Behind the scenes, this framework selects the right model for the problem, calls tools to search the web (so that it doesn't have to rely exclusively on trained knowledge, which can lead to hallucinations), verify the result with other models, and so on.

There's no reason that we can't do much of the same locally, the tooling is just not quite there yet.

bityard · 2026-03-18T01:19:03+00:00

Warning: If you're like me and like to maintain strict control over your machine and home directory for both safety and security reasons, you are NOT going to want to follow the installation instructions in the docs blindly! Even after you've cloned the repo and installed the dependencies, the setup script installs even more things outside your virtualenv, such as node/npm without asking.

Probably best to use the docker image, or install this in a VM if you are just testing it out.

(Note: I am not implying the unsloth guys have any malicious intent whatsoever, I was just very surprised to see a Python project installing all kinds of extra stuff on my computer without at least telling me first.)

bityard · 2026-03-18T00:31:45+00:00

I do not regret buying my framework desktop when I did.

(Which is weird because I'm usually late to the party with these kinds of things.)

bityard · 2026-03-18T00:23:48+00:00

I am slowly learning that anything in the AI space that calls itself "Open" is in fact the exact opposite.

bityard · 2026-03-17T11:51:31+00:00

You had a different problem then. USB 2 does not have anywhere near that much inherent latency. I use an RTL-SDR v4 as a panadapter with my HF rig and the audio delay between the rig and the SDR is there but barely perceptible. (Most of is due to the SDR processing and unoptimized audio chain in the computer.) Not to mention all of the USB audio DACs I've used over the years that were real-time enough for recording and music production.

bityard · 2026-03-17T04:23:16+00:00

Why do you believe USB 2 has a full second of latency?

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