You know what 10-4 means – stop your whining…

Posted on October 1st, 2007 by grinthock.
Categories: Department of radiocommunications., Department of rant services..

This is starting to get completely out of hand, and yes i’m ranting within the first sentence of my blog entry.

Previous weekend I had the chance to do a bit of DX, that’s long distance amateur radio operation, while camping we did some DX with various countries. In one of my DX contacts with the USA this ham gave me shit for saying “10-4″ saying that “10 codes are illegal in amateur radio and he didn’t know what 10-4 meant” that is simply complete B.S.

The law in Canada and as far as I know in the USA simply states that you cannot “Obscure the meaning of the messages” which means you cannot speak in code, or encrypt your conversation (albeit there are arguments there, but we won’t get into it), well in a world where i’m fully allowed to use IMBE / P25 coding over the air, I think using a UNIVERSALLY known 10 Code like 10-4 (which means affirmative in ALL 10-4 standards, including the APCO standard) is more than fine, it’s not “Obscuring the meaning of the message” in anyway.

So to the HAM who decided to complain, (and I have his call sign, and yes I should post it, but that would require effort looking it up in the logbook) you can please screw off. I could say OK, Roger, Affirmative, QSL, 10-4, Yep, Yes, Ya, Ja, mmmmhmmmm, sure, gotcha, or various Morse code versions of the same — you would still know what I meant.

So to all the ham’s pissed because I use 10-4 and perhaps the occasional 20 / 21 please do us all a favor and sell your radio equipment, because all you are doing is pissing off new ham’s, and showing the entire world what a bunch of idiots you are.

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Mobile Antennas and the need for tuning…

Posted on March 11th, 2007 by grinthock.
Categories: Department of radiocommunications..

There are a few things about Mobile Antenna’s that i’ve been reading recently — to be honest there are 2 major (or maybe more) mis-nomer’s about mobile antenna use that I keep hearing

1)  No need to tune

2)  Coaxial Length matters.

 I’m going to discuss item #2 first….    According to “Firestik” a well known CB antenna manufacturer, coax length matters.  Well first, that’s why we USE Coax, is so that it doesn’t matter.  That’s the funny part, is the the entire design specs of COAXIAL cable was so that the distance didn’t matter, because the cable was not part of the radiator.

According to Firestik and many “experts” 18 Feet is ideal, you MUST have 18 feet.  Well, i’d like to address that with some math.

Let’s say for a moment you have 18 feet of coax on Chan 19 (10-4 good buddy)

With 18 Feet of coax you are getting .332 db loss, and radiating 3.705 watts…

With 8 feet (the amount you probably need) you are getting .148 db loss and radiating 3.866 watts.

 Now firestik is suggesting that by having 18 feet of coax you doing “something” that causes you to gain more than .16 watt’s because if you are not — then why do we need 18 feet again?   It can’t have something to do with match, because again, it’s coax.    Even if it did, a match of 2.0 at 8 feet still has less loss than a match of 1.0:1 at 18 feet.  So sorry firestik, the math just doesn’t work.

 The first point — no need to tune — there’s a few things that tuning will do for you…


1)  Give you a better working setup

2)  Confirm you setup…

Now item 2 — really is where it matters.  Example — if your RF ground is poor, or your cable is shot, or a connector is poor (and yes, that happens out of the box) you are bound to have all sorts of issue.  Let’s be honest, if you are using a CB then 4Watt’s is all you have, you really do need all the help you can get — for you 2M/70cm Amateurs, you know all too well, if you lose 2w on the output — who cares, you pushed 50 anyway.

So that’s it for today, go measure up your coax — and for god sakes — cut it to length, it’s better for you..

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