AdmiralCochrane

My wife tolerates my radios and ham activity because her favorite uncle was a ham. Computer stuff and tools, any tools, on the other hand, are her favorite things in the world including stuff we aren't allowed to talk about here. I spend money on that stuff and she is happy.

That's one of my everyday radios.

BINGO

Regular. Learn to ignore it or use the forum function.

I agree, not even close to needing intervention. 50 years ago I had a CB and Radio Shack scanner in my car.

I learned to solder stuff from 0 gage battery cables down to 24 gage bell wire, but SMT stuff puts me in awe. I have removed some surface mount components, but never replaced or installed anything. I guess I need to watch some videos. I did tour a facility that made their own circuit boards and saw some components smaller than a flake of ground pepper. That stuff is sorcery

Some just like to type and hit enter even when it is irrelevant to the conversation. It may be due something they need to have fulfilled. I do agree, the ignore function works to eliminate material that shouldn't be present to begin with.

Ducting most commonly occurs associated with strong temperature inversions, either the strong night to day change around dawn or along storm fronts. I recall a few years ago consistently hearing a contact in Philadelphia PA for several spring mornings thorough central MD. Other times as storm fronts approached MD, hearing repeaters on Long Island discussing traffic on the LIE. If the long range signals persist mid day in stretches of calm weather, linking would be the main suspect.

How many people carry a copy of their ham or GMRS license with them in their car? You may be the ONLY one.

Haters gonna hate. The same guys hate other hams that use or don't use digital modes etc etc. As I've said before, the majority of active members in our local club are just into 2 way radios and don't care which license, band or transmission mode you are into.

I have another story about my original 87. I was doing an install on a 65 ft yacht belonging to a thoracic surgeon. Doc was on the boat while I was doing the work and saw my meter and picked it up and looked at it. He asked me where on the quality hierarchy the Fluke digital meters were. I told him they were top of the line, state of the art. Politely putting it down he cussed. I asked him why and he told me about his college roommate calling him up and asking him if he wanted to invest in his family business that was about to expand and go digital. He said "No thanks John. Those Simpson 260 analogs we used in physics class years ago will continue to be the industry standard for decades and decades to come." ... his roomy was John Fluke Jr.

At one point there was a free upgrade to the bigger white display for the original 87. All you had to do was send them a postcard with the serial number of your 87. I carried and used mine everyday for over 25 years until just about everything was worn out. Bought a new series V about 6 years ago. I bought the original when I was trying to resolve a harmonic problem that was overheating and blowing fuses on a rooftop HVAC unit. After the fuse there was a coil of excess length feed wire that had suspicious melted insulation in a reoccurring pattern. I removed that and it didn't help, so I made a slight change to the wire before the fuse and all was resolved. I bought the Fluke because someone told me the Beckman 110+ I was using wasn't enough to measure what was going on.

Maryland's cell phone law says "cell phone". Someone got a ticket using his ham radio, took it to court and won. Precedent set, in MD, using a 2 way radio while driving is OK.

The Jeep CANbus is also known to have this problem. Heat gun can solve it, but I keep a spare in the glove box in case it happens on the road. Usually just makes flaky display notifications on the dash because the different sub-modules stop talking to each other.

There are counterfeits of almost everything that is good. It is possible that you bought fakes. There are websites that show how to tell the difference between the legit Nagoyas and Diamonds. Directly speaking of the fake Diamond antennas, they are obvious if you have had a real one in your hand and know what the real ones look like. Going back to your testing. You did not mention testing across the frequencies/bands for each antenna. Most usually favor one side of the band more than the other. Ideally they would be tuned for center, but that is less than optimal if you end up using it primarily on one end of the band or the other