Intercontinental Radio Communications With The Help Of Fly Fishing Reels

All of us have experience in trying to explain to a confused store assistant exactly what type of kitchen implement you’re looking for, and why it is a perfectly suitable part for your autonomous flying lawn mower. Or in the case of [MM0OPX] trying to find fly fishing reels that …read more

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SatNOGS Update Hack Chat

Join us on Wednesday, October 30 at noon Pacific for the SatNOGS Update Hack Chat with Pierros Papadeas and the SatNOGS team!

Ever since the early days of the Space Race, people have been fascinated with satellites. And rightly so; the artificial moons we’ve sent into orbit are engineering marvels,

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Bent Electric Field Explains Antenna Radiation

We all use antennas for radios, cell phones, and WiFi. Understanding how they work, though, can take a lifetime of study. If you are rusty on the basic physics of why an antenna radiates, have a look at the very nice animations from [Learn Engineering] below.

The video starts with …read more

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NanoVNA is a $50 Vector Network Analyzer

There was a time when oscilloscopes were big and expensive. Now you can get scopes of various sizes and capabilities on nearly any budget. Vector network analyzers — VNAs — haven’t had quite the same proliferation, but NanoVNA may change that. [IMSAI Guy] bought one for about $50 and made …read more

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L Band Satellite Antennas Revealed

[SignalsEverywhere] has a lot of satellite antennas and he’s willing to show them off — inside and out — in his latest video that you can see below. Using software-defined radio techniques, you can use these antennas to pull off weather satellite images and other space signals.

A lot of …read more

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The Power Of Directional Antennas

AM broadcasting had a big problem, but usually only at night. During the day the AM signals had limited range, but at night they could travel across the country. With simple wire antennas, any two stations on the same frequency would interfere with each other. Because of this, the FCC …read more

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The $50 Ham: Dummy Loads, Part 2

In the last installment of “The $50 Ham” I built a common tool used by amateur radio operators who are doing any kind of tuning or testing of transmitters: a dummy load. That build resulted in “L’il Dummy”, a small dummy load intended for testing typical VHF-UHF handy talkie (HT) …read more

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The $50 Ham: Dummy Loads

This is an exciting day for me — we finally get to build some ham radio gear! To me, building gear is the big attraction of amateur radio as a hobby. Sure, it’s cool to buy a radio, even a cheap one, and be able to hit a repeater that …read more

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