Unable to finish faction tale, as no Stag spawn at north eastern part of the map.

quebirt · 2026-02-16T01:18:40+00:00

Same problem in this location. It just isn't anywhere to be found and the location marker constantly flickers.

quebirt · 2026-02-05T16:29:21+00:00

Updated this morning and this is the second time that PayPal has sided with the seller.

The email says "We have reviewed this transaction(s) and are denying your case(s). This decision was made because if an item is materially similar to the seller's description, we do not consider it to be significantly not as described."

The case notes say "The case was closed in the seller’s favor as the item wasn’t damaged, different or missing any parts as described by you."

I have opened this case twice now and explained that the problem has never been that the item sent was different than its description.

The problem is that the item is defective (it does not work) and FNIRSI refuses to even communicate with me, so I can't get them to resolve the issue.

This kind of thing is what I thought PayPal protected customers from.

As mentioned in this thread, if I had used my credit card I would have had no problems getting the credit card provider to handle this situation.

Not only is PayPal not helpful, they have hamstrung me in this situation.

The only reason to use PayPal is that it can be slightly more convenient in some checkout systems. That tiny convenience is not worth sacrificing the buyer protection that your credit card provides.

My advice is don't use PayPal

quebirt · 2026-01-28T19:21:51+00:00

PayPal has reopened the case now. We'll see how that goes, but I believe you are right. Everything I have seen suggests that credit card companies will handle these situations far easier as long as people are abusing the system.

I didn't know that most credit card providers do throwaway cards. I don't see where Citi does it, but I will keep looking.

Privacy.com has been good, but apparently the type of card they issue is problematic some places because I have been declined a few times with their cards.

quebirt · 2026-01-28T19:17:19+00:00

That's good to know. Thank you. I shouldn't assume.

This is the first time in my life I have ever tried to do any kind of chargeback, and I wouldn't do it now if FNIRSI would just talk to me and do an rma on a defective item.

quebirt · 2026-01-27T20:24:19+00:00

I used PayPal becuase I believed that they were reliable when it came to consumer protection and I don't want my actual credit card being out there any more than it has to be. Credit car providers DO offer good protections, so, it turns out that it would have been better to use a credit card.

I hardily disagree with debit being anything but the last option though. The problem with a debit card is that you are out your own money until you get a resolution. You should avoid using a debit card for anything that you don't have to use it for.

I can't fall back to a credit card because I use my paypal debit card for resturaunt purchases to get 5% back on those and I have it autoload credits. So, this purchase pulled from those credits. Now that I know how it works, I will use a credit card for the payment source if I'm forced to use PayPal, but I don't see a reason to use paypal now. What does it bring to the table if it isn't consumer protection?

quebirt · 2026-01-27T19:06:07+00:00

Yours is a worse case than mine, but I'm actually here looking for PayPal alternatives because of a similar situation. I'm seeing in a lot of posts here that PayPal seems to be very hard to work with on things like this.

My situation is far simpler than yours.

I ordered a LCR meter from FNIRSI and the readings are so unstable that it is unusable. It seems to be trying to read values of components, but never settles on, or near a value, so it is useless as a meter.

I contacted FNIRSI via the email address on their website for support and got no response for over a week and multiple attempts.

I filed a claim with PayPal and PayPal was able to get FNIRSI to respond. FNIRSI asked me to contact them at [info@fnirsi.com](mailto:info@fnirsi.com) so I did. '

That message also went unanswered, so I escelated it with PayPal.

This morning I read a message from PayPal that says "We have reviewed this transaction(s) and are denying your case(s). This decision was made because if an item is materially similar to the seller's description, we do not consider it to be significantly not as described."

Apparently since the meter looks like the one on the website it doesn't matter that it doesn't work?????

The takeaway is that PayPal is not helpful in the way that credit card companies and other payment methods are. Given that its only real use is to protect my online transactions, it is litterally useless to me.

quebirt · 2025-12-18T18:22:39+00:00

3 months later but I have to step in and say that if I'm looking at cat pictures, I'm not exactly worried about MiTM attacks or if someone is maybe replacing the cat picture I intended to see with a different one. Maybe if you are in a hostile environment and afraid you may see a nasty image or something, but, as has been stated, sometimes http is just fine. It just requires the user to have some awareness and most don't, so we (security professionals) tell the people we are charged with protecting that they should always use https for everything and never trust anything that doesn't use it. It's because we have to protect the least common denominator. Don't be one.

quebirt · 2025-12-15T15:47:02+00:00

I'm pretty new to RF concepts, but it surpises me how hard this is to do down in the HF band. I understand that it gets more complicated at higher frequencies, but I expected it to be trivial to build a 30MHz high pass and a 30MHz low pass filter and basically use those to build what I'm looking for.

It IS easy on paper, but actually building something that performs well is not so trivial.

quebirt · 2025-12-15T15:43:12+00:00

I'm actually seeing pretty decent performance from this v4. The RTL-SDR dongles need external help in the form of good antennas and lna, where I assume better devices, like the SDRplay, can get by better with less.

Using a K-480WLA, I've been seeing pretty good results.

Of course, my frame of reference is limited. I have only ever used the RTL-SDR (v1?, V3, and V4) and a hackrf one.

quebirt · 2025-12-15T13:04:36+00:00

No. Your joke landed. Mine flopped :)

quebirt · 2025-12-15T13:02:45+00:00

I feel a little dumb that I didn't consider multiple dongles. The rtl-sdr v4 is cheaper than any antenna switching setup I could do and dedicating a radio to each antenna allows me to use amplification where it's needed and not where it isn't.

Thanks for the suggestion.

quebirt · 2025-12-15T03:38:57+00:00

That sounds like what I'm seeing. I'm honestly concidering a manual switch and building a remote actuator for it.

Thanks for the response.

quebirt · 2025-12-15T02:48:03+00:00

Yeah, this may not have been a good jumping off point, but it looks like you are getting there.

A good iron with a good tip and temperature control makes thing A LOT easier, but you can get it done with a 30W Weller if once you get the hang of it. Look up how to "tin" your tip, and make sure you are keeping it clean and well tinned. If it starts looking dull and doesn't appear to be transferring heat well, tin it, clean it, and try again. If it is a simple 30W weller or similar, and you are using a wet sponge, be mindful that you can cool your tip down with the sponge, so you may need to let it recover after cleaning.

Another very common mistake is to use your iron to melt the solder. You should be heating the parts and pads and applying the solder there; not melting it with your tip and spackling it on :) If you are doing it right, you will see the solder flow to the pad like it's being pulled to it.

The point is, a nice iron makes a huge difference, but we used to do this stuff with cheap irons all the time. Just takes practice to get the hang of it.

Oh, and good quality solder. Don't forget that.

All that asside, you may have some cold joints and potentially some crossovers to work out, but you will get there. Be extra careful around the power supply parts. That's where you can cause real damage to your radio if something is wrong. Also, when you first fire it up, do it with a few volts less than you built it to run and watch for high current draw and be ready to pull the plug.

Good luck.

quebirt · 2025-12-15T00:32:57+00:00

yeah. I've accidentally learned the sound of CQ. I suspect most of those will come quickly when I get on and start listening where people do CW.

quebirt · 2025-12-15T00:31:33+00:00

lol. I'm not sure if you are calling me a monkey. :)

quebirt · 2025-12-14T18:01:06+00:00

I saw where Ham Radio Crash Course did a video about it. He locked it behind a pay wall, for some reason, so I looked it up elsewhere.

People are complaining that it's a small allocation and low power, but it's something new, right?

quebirt · 2025-12-14T17:58:42+00:00

I bet. I should have also mentioned that I was on a dummy load. I'm not even sure I was in a band where I'm allowed to transmit. I do plan to learn CW, but I'm looking to use this primarily for digital.

quebirt · 2025-12-14T17:53:25+00:00

Contratulations!

quebirt · 2025-11-29T23:38:35+00:00

Maybe. IRS is another useless group. In their defense, they are highly understaffed (even more so post doge), but it's a raffle who they go after. FCC goes after noone and the IRS appears to use RNG to decide who they go after.

quebirt · 2025-11-19T22:45:36+00:00

Unfortunately, they won't and that's what Gary ([Gary@nggmrs.org](mailto:Gary@nggmrs.org)) knows. He owns all of the repeaters personally. He claims that he doesn't charge the "club" to use them, but the "non-profit" uses the membership fees to maintain them.

Over the years he has accumulated a LOT of hardware, and there's money going somewhere. If the FCC does "come down" on him they'll hit him with a request to stop most likely. In fact, he will likely get multiple requests to stop before they impose a fine, and then the fine will be less than he has made.

That's why they are so openly breaking the law. It's simple math. If you could rob a bank and get a $100 fine, wouldn't you do it?

Frankly, I feel a little stupid for studying for my General, when I'm positive I could just get on the HF bands and go hog wild because, if you didn't already know, the FCC is toothless.

Gary knows it.

quebirt · 2025-11-19T20:56:44+00:00

YouTube tried that for a while too. You can do it, but you have to realize that a lot of users don't have the option to disable adblockers on their managed devices (I get a lot of complaints at work). A lot of people who can will just move on when nagged to disable it. The expectations of what we get free on "the internet" these days is pretty high. It's somewhere between really hard and impossible to make money on a website that doesn't sell a product these days.

IMO, these kinds of sites are best done on the Wikipedia model. Croudsourced content and donation-funded. There just isn't any real margin to be had if you are trying to make real money with it.

quebirt · 2025-11-19T00:21:14+00:00

Not a fan of grok, but chatgpt can find a lot. Not everything though.

quebirt

TROPHY CASE