You have quite a few 10M contacts in there.  Cool.  I need to spend more time on the short bands.  Usually I'm so busy that it's long past dark when I get to sit so it's 40M and 80M for me.

Quote from: ttabs on November 14, 2012, 12:30:55 AM

A fellas' gota start somewhere. 

Welcome aboard tabbs.  You have one helluva start there.

I just did a zombie march through the practice tests at qrz.com.  Once I started passing it most of the time I knew I was ready.

2MT350, what's the CB community like up there in drizzle land?  I'm north of Boston and I never use my CB because 90% of what I hear is either low-lifes getting rude and crude or people skipping Dx out of the middle of the country.  I miss the usefullness it had in the 70s and 80s.  Speed traps are a part of daily life here in the east and I used to know where they were from the constant CP reports.  Now no one seems to use CBs on the highways here.

Will do.  I have a roll up slim jim pinned to my office wall.  I'll compare it to the stock duck and the Nagoya.

Ray, thanks for posting this.  I have a FT-60R and have been living with the factory rubber duck.  I didn't know about these antennas, but they get good reviews on eHam so I just ordered one (male SMA).

Quote from: deanathpc on November 09, 2012, 01:35:10 PM
Being in EMS I can tell you that HIPPA is a pain in the arse.

It's such a touchy subject still. I don't understand half of it.

Basically we can't discuss anything about the patient to anyone except those who are in direct contact with them.  Also any documentation with any identifying info has to be protected.  If not needed it needs to be shredded.  Things like a social security number is starred out on our demographic sheets when printed.  Which makes billing a nightmare.

Dispatchers can say the name on the air while dispatching but we can't when calling in a report to the hospital.  Still do not understand that one.

Dean

There's nothing to understand.  The law was written by idiots under the dome in D.C.  It's that simple.  Our elected representatives are incompetent at their jobs.

Gil also mentioned a magnetic loop.  They don't have to be large.  MFJ sells one that is 3 feet square and does 15M - 40M.  It's not cheap, but it gets fairly good reviews on eHam.net.  I'm sure you can make a manually adjusted one that would be cheap except for the HV variable capacitor.

I've also always wanted an old Land Rover.  But I've always wondered how reliable those British things are.  In my youth I had an MG-B and the only good thing I can say about that car is that it turnd me into a mechanic.  It was a classic British car in the sense that it would break on Wednesday.  I would fix it all day Saturday and drive it all day Sunday because it was so much fun.  Then it would break on Wednesday and the cycle would repeat.

Too much fuel and specialized parts for me.  If this were 25 years ago I'd be saying I wanted an air cooled beetle.  10 years ago I would say I wanted a Toyota pickup.  But today I'm not sure.  When the SHTF dust settles and there's nothing left but cockroaches, AKs and zombies, what's the vehicle that will still be running?

Quote from: White Tiger on November 05, 2012, 06:11:30 PM
How much would the performance of the inverted "L" suffer if you could only raise it to 30'?

Quote from: cockpitbob on November 05, 2012, 06:04:32 PM
I also have a 10M/6M dipole in the attic that works pretty well.

Any RF/EMF issue inside the house due to this? Is the 10m/6m dipole configured in an inverted "v" in the attic?

Thanks for the information cockpitbob!

I'm far from an antenna guru, so I can only guess that lowering the inverted L antenna will make 40M and longer act more like NVIS.  I'm down in a hole so might be a good thing for me.  some day I'm going to install EZ-NEC and play with simulating antennas.

For the 10M/6M in the attic, it is strung straight and flat.  I haven't noticed any EMI issues, but I don't use that antenna much and it's a 2 story house with nothing but bedrooms upstairs so there's not much to be bothered besides smoke detectors, alarm clocks and a TV.  I'm only transmitting a barefoot 100W.

I have a 180' long wire in an inverted L config.  It goes 60' straight up to a tree, then 120' to another tree.  It's 12AWG brown insulated Home Depot wire (~$50 for 500).  The only thing you can see without really trying is the insulators.  I used black Dacron cord in the trees.  It used to be 100' long and I can't tell that the extra 80' did anything at all.

I just use a manual cross-needle tuner (MFJ-949E) and can work anything from 160M to 10M, though of course performance is a compromise.  From my shack in the basememt I have 20'  of RG8X going through the wall to a 1:1 current balun (ferrite beads over the coax).  The shield side goes to my ground rod and the center goes to the long wire.  Very stealthy.

I also have a 10M/6M dipole in the attic that works pretty well.

Tim,
The 10A power supply will be fine powering a 6A rig.  Even if the rig draws more than the 10A your supply is rated for, it shouldn't cook anything. 

Good point about the mosquitos.  They shouldn't be underestimated during SHTF.

Back in 1989 I flew a little plane from CA to my relatives in Fairbanks, AK.  At that time both Alaska and Canada required small planes going long distances to carry survival gear including 10,000 calories of food per person, an axe, fishing gear, Alaska even required a gun.  On their required list of items was bug repellant and mosquito head netting for each occupant.  That concerned me more than any of the other items.  I've heard rumors of the Yukon mosquitos carrying off small children and cross breeding with turkeys.

Let us know what you think of the Miracle Whip.  They look too little to perform up to their high price.