How ham radio endures - and remains a disaster lifeline - in the iPhone era
When disaster strikes, and conventional communication systems fail, amateur ham radio operators step in to bridge the gap, providing a crucial link between those in affected areas and the outside world.
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Never been a better time to get into HF communications I think. You can get fairly inexpensive (comparatively anyway) Chinese software defined radio by Xiegu, and literally just stick a long wire in the back as an antenna and since the radio has an auto tuner, all you need to do is get that wire as high in the air as possible. I don't have that radio so I use a manual tuner but a setup like that is the only way I can get on the air from my current house.
Never been a better time to get into HF communications I think.
Also because the sun is in the middle of some kind of ~10 year cycle that means a ton of sun spots! That makes propagation go further.
Yeah, we're not too too far removed from the last solar minimum either, so we got a good deal of solar cycle left before the next minimum too. I say this all the time but hams are the coolest sun worshiping group I've ever been a part of.
Thats my boy Solaire, Praise the sun!
What will the auto tuner in that radio handle? I have an ICOM 7300 and it will handle 3 to 1 SWR and I think it will handle 10 to 1 with lower power in an emergency mode setting. But I use a manual tuner myself.
Ive heard people say that they can get their random wire antennas fed right into the g90 with little issue, I don't have the tech specs but Id assume its near 9 to 1 if their random wire is working, and that's made me curious to try the unit since I don't have any SDR yet. The unit only pumps out 20w max so thats probably a factor. On my Yaesu ft 891where I can run 100w easy I use an external LC tuner and a counterpoise to mitigate rf buildup on the chassis though.
That's actually pretty impressive if they can just feed a random wire directly into it and get it to transmit.
Its nominally called a 'random wire antenna' but the caveat is that it needs a tuner and if the wire length is too close to a length that makes it naturally resonate without a tuner, the antenna will not work.
