Post 700.

of a series of six jillion and four.

Be the first kid on your block to collect them all.

Today I am going to spend a little time looking into what route I want to go with in ham radio. I do want to go somewhere with it, but I do not want to set up a huge radio shack and have antennas strung out all over hell.

I think I want to stay in the HF range of about 80 to 10 meters. I also want to have a fairly compact portable unit that I can throw in the pickup and go somewhere with it and set it up.

CW, AM and SSB sound about right as I have no desire to get into either RTTY or bouncing signals off of repeaters and sattelites.

Things are beginning to look a little MilSpec to me as there are quite a number of military sets out there that seem to fit the bill. They look interesting for a number of reasons.

First of all for the most part they are simple to operate as they have to be operated by GIs with minimal training. They do not have all of the bells and whistles that most hams like to twink with.

If the package hasn't been broken up and all the acccessories are there and complete, they provide a very nice little radio station in a small package that can be set up and disassembled rather quickly.

Since early Vietnam most of them have pretty normal power needs and can be adapted without having to create off the wall power supplies for AC power use, a basic 12 volt DC power supply can be hooked right up in many cases.The days of dynamotors and such are long gone.

I am actually not particularly partial to MilSpec in this case, but I do not see too many civvie units out there that seem to fit this bill.

While a lot of clubs have vans or trailers, that is fine for them. I just want a simple, portable HF unit that I can use when I want to use it.

We'll see where this leads me.

If any readers have any ideas, please feel free too post them in the comments section.

Pic, out.






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