MarkInTampa

You quoted the Africa part of the system. The Australian portion, SKA-Low, will revolve around 131,072 antenna "trees" in the country's western Wajarri country. As the name implies, the array will focus on low-frequency signals. The Guardian notes it's expected to be eight times more sensitive than existing telescopes, and map the cosmos about 135 times faster. My dad was head of R&D for the DSN (Deep Space Network). I spent a lot of time as a kid as a willing slave loading, labeling and swapping computer tapes recording VLBI experiments at the Goldstone and Owens Valley radio telescopes. I then helped load them into the mainframe in the basement of Cal Tech. Fun times as a kid. I moved out of state when I was 18 and every 5 years or so when visiting the old man over the next 20 years I would still go with him to work for a day at Goldstone to satisfy the nerd in me. I was amazing to see the development of the DSN for the 32 years he spent at NASA/JPL.

The Windows driver for the USB programming cable/cables is probably not loaded or incorrect. See https://www.buytwowayradios.com/blog/2021/06/how-to-install-the-wouxun-programming-cable-and-driver.html

Do you have any experience with the Airspy HF+? I know the Realtek based dongle I have currently is ok for VHF and UHF but sucks at HF. Right now if I try and listen to HF off my dongle (DX-Patrol) off a 35ft long wire for the most part all I get are harmonics from a AM broadcast station playing Glen Beck shows on all bands. I'm getting ready to put up a 35ft mast for my GMRS antenna and something like a EndFedz SWL end fed half wave while I'm at it and want a decent HF SDR receiver to go along with it. Use would be 50/50 between shortwave listening and ham band listening. If you have any advice on another dilemma... My new mast is 35ft and want to run the HF end fed dipole from my mast to my shed, a distance available of 85ft. The EndFedz antenna is 45ft so it would be no problem. Also thinking of a EndFedz 40 meter that is 74ft would work as well. If I run it this way I'll be paralleling power lines that are 30ft away (see picture). I'm in central Florida and the house and antenna would be positioned from north to south. My biggest concern is if I'll be picking up a ton of noise because of the proximity to the power lines. I can run the antenna east/west but that would probably rule out a 74ft antenna. Any thoughts?

Comet GP-6NC Much better than my other two antennas tested...

I picked up a NanoVNA a few weeks ago to test my antennas. With a quick 10-15 minute YouTube tutorial on using NanoVNA with NanoVNA Saver (free software) I had my antenna tested in minutes. I find it much easier to use the computer interface than a 2 or 4 inch touch screen. It's also nice to be able to save or screenshot the results.

If you haven't played around with it yet, I've been kinda addicted to the websdr.org website. Listen to all sorts of HF, VHF and UHF in real time from receivers all around the world over the web. It's a bit of a learning curve but it's fun. So I picked up a USB SDR dongle for around $50 a few days ago and hooked it up to my spare GMRS antenna. The antenna doesn't do HF at all but does seem to work ok on the VHF and UHF bands for the most part. It has also been a bit of a learning curve but getting I'm getting there, it's only been a few days. It takes a bit to figure out what kind of signals you are looking at on the waterfall. At the moment I'm just looking for normal FM repeaters but with software plugins you can decode DMR, Packet and all sorts of other signal types. I can also have it set to record audio only when the squelch is broke. Cool for recording your local GMRS repeater 24hrs a day if you want. Anybody else play with SDR?

I met Bill Gates around 1980 or so. There was a TRS-80 user group that met up once a month in a chem lab at University of La Verne and he was there. I had a chance to talk to him about a few peek and poke commands for the machine shop project. The funny part was the group meeting had no agenda, no speakers or anything. It was basically around 50 of us lugging in our Model-1's to the lab with our software collection. We just walked around the lab trading copies of software. That was the whole purpose if the meet. Can't say I saw him actually saw him trading copies of software or not, but that was the basically what the meets were about.

1980-81 or so. The Model-III just hit the store when I left. I then worked part time (still in high school) installing and setting up Model-III's with Radio Shacks other "killer app", Scripsit, for a year or so in the field for small print shops. The print shops were amazed that they could get a computer, a word processor, and a modified IBM Selectric typewriter or a daisy wheel printer with proportional spacing that operated at a whopping 10-20 characters per second! It made justifying margin alignment a simple task, something we take for granted these days. My girlfriend's family at the time owned a machine shop. At the time the CNC endmills that they owned you programmed through a Telex machine on paper tape. I built a serial interface from plans for the Telex machine to use the paper tape part of it as a printer and wrote an emulation program in Basic to make it work on a Model-III. I was proud of what I did for a 16-17 year old kid at the time.

I had a job in high school at the local Radio Shack demoing Model-1's. Wrote a spreadsheet in VisiCalc for a local golf course to keep track of handicaps. We ended up selling over 50 Model-1's with that spreadsheet to golf courses all around the So Cal area. I've still got a kinda rare Model-4P and a few others including a Osborne, Kaypro and a ultra rare Fujitsu Micro 16S in the closet.

Buy Two Way Radios Black Friday sale list is up.... https://www.buytwowayradios.com/blog/2022/11/2022-cyber-holiday-sale.html

Actually I have CTCSS and DCS on receive disabled for repeater channels and only use tones on transmit. That way I can tell if somebody is running simplex on a repeater channel, if I have two repeaters on the same frequency, find new repeaters, etc. I've got a decent antenna and radio (KG1000+ feeding a Comet GP-6 GMRS) and don't really get much if any interference from out of band to really need tone on receive. I also keep the repeater input channels in my repeater scan group as well to see I can can receive the input and how strong it is (make a simplex buddy!) or if there is somebody talking simplex on them causing interference to the input of a repeater. This actually happens a lot, we have a shipping port near two of our repeaters and some foreign ships use 467.5500 and 467.7000 simplex causing havoc on the repeater inputs for a day or so until they depart the port.

Same here. We do have a pretty strong local repeater that has close to no if any squelch tail or ID. It's a great repeater but nobody thinks it works half the time because of the lack of of a tail or ID. It's hard to tell you even keyed it.

I'm currently shopping around for a PC based SDR transceiver that can do GMRS. I'm hoping to find a deal on one on Black Friday or we have the Tampa Hamfest coming up in a few weeks and see what kinda fun stuff they may have. I've been addicted to playing with SDR receivers at websdr.org. Do you know of something I should be looking for? Looking at a Pluto+ at the moment.

When I ordered up the Comet GP6 antenna from DX Engineering I knew I needed at least a Type-N to UHF/SO-239 adapter for the KG1000+ (antenna is Type-N) and had plans to buy the NanoVNA once the antenna came in. DX Engineering had "all gender" Type-N to UHF/SO-239 kit (4 piece adapter package) for $20 that allows me to have any gender (Type-N male or female and SO-239 male or female) at the end of the cable. Another $20 got me the same kit but for Type-N to SMA. I'm covered on hooking up any of my antennas to a radio, HT, or the NanoVNA.

I read something about cheap knockoffs before buying. I didn't want to order from China but from a reputable dealer. So I ordered mine (NanoVNA-H4) for around $100 shipped from R&L Electronics and it came in 3 days. Fair price from a highly rated dealer. I did attempt to pull a SWR sweep on a Nagoya NA-771G HT antenna but trying to test a HT antenna on a NanoVNA is close to impossible from what I've gathered on internet. It's hard to compensate for the ground plane of the radio itself since its not attached to the radio. I did a SWR sweep with a 6 inch jumper and holding the antenna at the connector in my hand and pulled a SWR of around 3.0 across the band. If I just let it dangle from the jumper it was 6.0 to 8.0! For the price, its a neat tool to play with for external antennas, but for HT antennas it's kinda useless. But then again, I've only had it for a day.

Not sure if the jitter/static is from a tower about a block away from me or because I have a 6 inch USB-C cable plugged into the VNA to the computer or that I just need to play with the options a bit more. I do have a few signals in the 466Mhz range that are strong enough that I can pick them up on a 935G HT with no antenna attached.

I picked up a NanoVNA-H4 analyzer and ran a quick sweep of three antennas I have. A Comet GP-6NC dual band (GMRS/MURS) with 50ft of 400MAX cable, a N9TAX dual band (GMRS/MURS) Slim Jim and a KB9VBR GMRS J-Pole with 25ft of RG-213. Here are the results, first time using the NanoVNA and there are lots of other options to play with but will take a bit of time to learn them all. I will say the Comet is perfectly tuned for GMRS. Comet GP-6NC 1.07 VSWR at 462.5 Mhz 1.06 VSWR at 467.5 Mhz N9TAX dual band Slim Jim 1.30 VSWR at 462.5 Mhz 1.30 VSWR at 467.5 Mhz KB9VBR GMRS J-Pole 1.75 VSWR at 462.5 Mhz 1.35 VSWR at 467.5 Mhz

That worked great! Thank you very much!! Mark

Page 46, under Basic Operation titled "Simultaneous Scanning on the A and B Areas".

Thanks, just wanted to make sure I wasn't just me. Since the 1000G+ has dual speakers and a separate volume for each band, I thought it would be nice to scan a few active GMRS channels on one side and AM aircraft bands at a low volume on the other. Oh well

I'm trying to use the dual scan feature of the radio. Instructions say "The A and B areas can perform a scan at the same time. to do this, press SCAN to activate the scan on A area, press AREA to go to the B area, then press SCAN to activate the scan on B area. Both areas should scan simultaneously." If I start a scan in area A as soon as I press the AREA button scanning stops on area A and doesn't resume. If I start a scan in area B and press the SCAN button it scans B but as soon as I hit the AREA button it stops scanning as well. Am I missing something to scan both areas simultaneously? (BTW, the BAND button on the 1000G has been relabeled AREA on the 1000G+ version). Thanks

You can use CHIRP (it now supports the 935G) to edit the channels, it has the ability to insert and delete rows (channels) and move all existing channels up or down. It works great for channel management but doesn't offer all the options the Wouxun software does. So I use both.

You get it yet? Just placed a order for mine a few minutes ago along with a Comet GP-6NC, a 9 dBi gain antenna. It's about to get real!

Got my license a few weeks ago and ordered up a KG-935G the same day. The next day I searched Craigslist for GMRS and I'll be darn if there wasn't another KG-935G with N9TAX dual band Slim Jim antenna, a KB9VBR GMRS J-Pole and a Nagoya NA-771G rubber ducky listed for sale and bought the package. Ended up with 2 KG-935's and 4 different antenna combinations. It's kinda cool having two 935G's and be able to compare different antenna's in real time. The Slim Jim is the clear winner so far.