Starting Out: Doing things differently

Since I started, there are a lot of little things that I've quite simply done twice. A lot of what I did early on was done with little input from anyone else, and it's stuff that if I hadn't rushed into, I probably would have done right the first time:

Cabling:

The first antenna that went up was a Diamond D-150 Discone that is at the rear of the house given it's sitting up above the south facing NBN Wireless antenna, and has line of sight to the local club repeater. The shack is at the front of the house. The first thing I did was purchased a great heap of RG-58 and hooked it up. 

My ceiling has about 2 km worth of CAT5e cabling in it, not to mention all of that electrical wiring in it. The RG-58 runs in parallel with it all. 

When I finally saw what the losses on RG-58 look like on higher frequencies, I respent the money and effort replacing it with RG-213. Yes it's a lot more expensive, and it's a reasonable length run (a bit over 10m), but it reduces the losses by quite a bit. FWIW - I didn't have a perceived problem I was necessarily trying to fix, as much as I was just trying to optimise what I had. When I did this, I still didn't even have a license, and I'd only really listened to a local repeater that I've managed to pickup on a HT with the antenna off it.

I purchased enough that I replaced the RG-58 on the significantly shorter HF vertical as well. I can't hurt.

Being a computer tech and something of a hoarder, my tool box still had a heap of old BNC connectors that fit RG-58 (I know entire generations of techs who have no idea what I might have had them for). I also had an expensive 20 odd year old crimper that I stopped using not long after as clients moved to UTP cabling from coax.  The stuff was familiar, and I could get bits to make wall plates. Something I can't buy off the shelf with UHF connectors. 

That wall plate is since gone, and will be replaced by a bullnose. I've since moved toward needing coax switches to jump between antenna and radio, and all of those adapters and connectors all impact signal, not matter how slightly. Now I have a few PL259 to BNC cables.. they're still handy if I want to hook up the HTs to the discone (easier to work with adapters to SMA). In this time I could have saved most of $100 by not working with BNC so much.

Antennas:

My first shack antenna was the Diamond D-150 Discone. When I purchased it, it was really just to connect to an SDR to see if I could get any kind of image from the ISS via SSTV (the answer was.. kind of.. but not so much). 

This is by no means a bad antenna. It's been jacked up a couple of times. It now sits on a 1.8m pole above the NBN Wireless antenna. I can key up a couple of repeaters both around 100km away, so it's certainly not bad. 

That said, it's on my list of things to replace. Probably with another discone - but one that is substantially bigger. The D150 has a height of about 1m. There are plenty that are 2m, and at similar cost. More than likely it's replacement will get thrown on top of a flag pole to achieve stupid height, and the D150 left in place so it can be used for listening to the XYL's preferred non HAM frequencies without issue while I do other things. 

40m trapped dipole. At the time, I decided I couldn't get away with another outside antenna, and tried this in the ceiling. It really didn't pick up much other than a few FT8 signals. It spent more time up there disconnected than it ever did being used. Finally, and at time of writing, it's sitting outside.. sitting no where near high enough to be effective, collecting more noise than the vertical (see below). It's soon to be replaced, though will wind up being kept for future experimentation. 

The Inverted L. I built this off a recommendation, and it was a fun antenna project. At time, I was somewhat concerned about the XYL's acceptance of poles and antennas around the place, so this was crammed down the side of the house, at a height that isn't quite above the roof line. I eventually replaced it with the 40m trapped dipole (above) - I haven't noticed any better reception with that change, so it's likely to be more an environmental issue than antenna issue. This one is wound up and will be kept for future experimentation too.

The HF vertical. The awesome radial free that is quite a touchy issue in HF. The seller tells you it doesn't need them. Most of the antenna theory tells you otherwise. There are people with them who get great results. I can hear a lot more with it than I can with a dipole.. that is strung below roof height.. I also hear a lot of noise. 

There are two parts to my feelings on this: Firstly, I could have spent similar money and purchased something similar and Australian built if I knew where to look (marketing isn't the strong suit of some of these guys). I also could have saved a bit more money and purchased a GAP Titan DX - it has the height, and has counterpoises that would still allow me to install it where the current vertical is, and still manage to keep the counterpoise within the property boundary. Ultimately this is likely to happen. I don't have a lot of space for radials. It's 2.2m to the fence line, and the ground is concrete, so there isn't a lot of radial options there. We don't have much yard space - and what do needs to be kid friendly, so I can't shove a vertical in the centre of the yard with radials running off in every direction. 

Radios:

I'm not sure I've necessarily made a bad radio investment to date - you can never have too many. The old Baofeng UV-5RE is great as a budget handheld to get started. The Baofeng DM-1702 I grabbed for DMR is however is a bastard. The audio controls are woeful and it's either in VFO or Memory mode, depending on how you programmed it.. with it's custom software (not Chirp). The software itself is OK, and it's not hard to configure to get on to some talkgroups. Otherwise, there are better radios out there (any of them really). The only upside was that it was cheap.

The Retevis RT-95 is an Anytone clone. It's OK, and it was the first of my shack V/UHF radios. Out of the box it was missing part of the bands available in Australia, but doing some research I was able to find a way to open it up. It works OK. As a starter radio its OK. Part of me wishes I'd saved some extra cash for a dual band Icom or Yaesu. Once you've used a Japanese radio, you start to see what the budget Chinese radios are missing. Still, for a tight budget, you could do worse.

The Xiegu G90 is a great SDR based radio. It has a cult following, and I get why. It's small, feature packed, and easy to work with. It was my first HF radio though, and it was a rude shock moving to a more traditional style radio (in my case an old IC-706MkIIG). It's probably on par with modern HF radios - not that I'd know, I've never used anyone. It's certainly a world away from the older radios.  The only dislikes I have with the Xiegu are the filtering is poor compared to my IC-706, the AF really isn't balanced (especially when someone close is booming in), and the menu setup is quite a bit more obscure.  The firmware update process made more than a couple of people think they've bricked their radios. And the screen is a tad small. Otherwise, it's an SDR radio with a colour screen, built in tuner that could tune a piece of wet spaghetti, a pretty waterfall, and the more recent firmware revisions have given access to FM making the thing useful on 10m finally. Honestly, I'd debated going with the old standard Icom IC-718. The part of me that wants to learn how to drive a HF radio still wishes I'd had, but the G90 looks to compare more with the significantly more expensive Icom radios. 

Conclusions

Everything in this hobby is a compromise, but you can save some money by doing some things right the first time... it's just not always clear from the starting gate what "right" actually is. It's a journey for each of us, and asking for advice in this hobby from 100 different people will net you about 500 different answers. 480 of them will likely be "right". 5 of them might just suit your specific environment. I'm not sure anyone wants to give you one right answer as much as give you things to try, to think about and to use it as an opportunity to help you learn something. 

Sometimes that frustrates me... but then I remember the number of times I've done the same thing to younger, less experienced IT guys... I won't give them the answer (unless of course it's time critical) as much as I'll give them some things to think about, some wisdom and I'll point them in the general direction and send them on their way. I can't, after all, teach them experience. The best I can do is help teach them how to learn in hope that they too will gain some of that experience stuff.