Hey folks, this is AI0J here with Ham Radio Village, and today we're going to go over
a demo of a sort of basic ham station setup. We're going to cover both VHF, UHF setups,
portable setups, handheld setups, as well as sort of a base station setup. So we've
got a bunch of things to go through here. You know, let's start with sort of the most
basic and very likely the first radio you may have as a ham would be like a handheld
radio like one of these. The Baofengs are also very, very popular. They're like $35
for an entry-level radio. I have a couple upstairs. These are great, you know, handheld.
You don't have to worry anything about them whatsoever in terms of external hookups. They
come with their own little antenna right on top, affectionately called the rubber ducky.
They have a self-contained battery, you know, power button inside, pretty straightforward.
You turn it on, it's got a button just like a walkie-talkie you probably had when you
were a kid. Push to talk, you're good to go. Simple. So not much to hold a lot to talk
about there. Definitely if you're starting out, it's a great place to go. A technician
license will grant you all the ability to use these on the VHF and UHF bands. You're
good to go there. This is a very similar model to the other one. This does DMR, which is
one of the newer digital modes. That's from Anytone. But it works other than that, you
know, the same sort of way. Push to talk, simple. As you move up, you may decide to
get something more what they call a mobile station. Sorry for the camera movement here.
This is optionally designed to go into a vehicle, which is why it's called a mobile. It's not
super portable, but it's also not super heavy either. You could definitely put that in a
backpack or something of that sort if you didn't want to affix it into a vehicle. Has
a separate detached microphone in this case. You know, this one is corded. You can actually,
this radio actually even has Bluetooth because it's fancy. So you can even use a Bluetooth
headset like it's 1990 and look all cool. This one also is VHF and UHF. It's got a very
cool color screen on here. You can change channels, things like that. I know it's a
little hard to read that on the live stream there. But you know, you can program this
with your computer. It uses a USB cable. You hook it up and you can program it to have
all the channel memories, you know, with fancy names, things like that. These have been around
for a long time, mobile radios on VHF and UHF bands. The older ones obviously aren't
quite as fancy in color screens, but they work just as well. Technology wise, you know,
in terms of radio power and transmitting, they all are going to work the same, more
or less, in the VHF and UHF bands. One thing to note is these also almost always need external
power. So you can see this has a cable coming off the back for power. Almost all ham radio
equipment runs on 13.8 volts, which is standard for a vehicle to provide. So it makes it really
nice and easy to use a standard 12 volt system that you would have in a camper, an RV, car,
maritime, any of those sort of setups. And you get to use 12 volt batteries. So, not a whole lot
to say about those. The antennas that you use for VHF and UHF on a mobile, again, those are not
integrated into the unit. So you would have something separate. You can get very small ones
that can, you know, attach to the side of a vehicle and be fairly discreet. Or you can go
large and put like a big mast on the side of your house, for example. If we slowly pan over here,
past that HF radio there, that large white stick right there is actually a giant VHF, UHF, and
actually that one's 220 as well. So that's about a good, I think, eight feet long or so fully
assembled. That's actually in two sections right there. That's probably in the larger end of a VHF,
UHF. Most, I'd say, most typical home installs probably use one that's literally about half that
size, so about four feet tall, which is actually the VHF, UHF I have installed currently outside.
Yeah, the comment, good Lord, absolutely. That is a very large antenna, but still generally small
in terms of ham radio antennas. All right, we're going to slowly pan back over. Yes, in the city,
you know, giant antennas are definitely out of reach. You know, your landlord is probably not
going to be very happy of you sticking, you know, eight foot pole at the side of a window. But there
are actually a ton of resources online about stealthy antennas. There's actually a whole
books written about having stealth antennas for two meters. There's actually some really
great ideas where you can use some copper pipe and you'd make a planter out of it. And so it
looks just like a normal planter and your flowers growing on it. It's actually an antenna. Your
neighbors don't even know you can put that out in the patio. All right, so those are pretty simple
VHF and UHF radios. You know, as you get higher in license and you, you know, maybe get your
general license or maybe you're, you know, love math and you wouldn't got your extra license.
First off, congrats. You're going to want to get into the world of HF radios. Now here's actually
an HF radio that's, that's fairly old by today's standard. This, I think, dates back to late 70s,
80s maybe. It's made by ICOM. This is a full HF radio can go from, you know, really lower bands,
like 160 meters all the way. I think this one does up to, to I think 10 meter.
And, you know, this is much more fully featured HF. You start to climb in price. Unfortunately,
I know everyone, you know, the, the question is always, oh, hey, I want an HF radio, but I don't
want to spend a couple hundred dollars. And that's, that's hard to do. It is possible. Usually you're
probably going to look at something like a kit radio for that and not so much something pre-bought.
You can also buy things like this that are older and used, and you get a good deal. I think this
was my first HF radio I bought when I got my general license. I paid a few hundred dollars
for it from another ham. Definitely be careful buying used equipment. Ideally, if you could get
to, you know, a swap meet or something in person, which I know is a little difficult right now,
where you can actually test the radio, plug it in, make sure it works. You know, it doesn't
immediately just like, you know, let the magic smoke out of the box when you power it up.
A radio like this, you know, still fully can work on everything today, even all the new
digital modes that are available and very, very popular. You can use this with that. It's no
problem. You can actually, even this radio, you can actually even control with a computer to set
frequency and transmit and all that sort of stuff. You can actually still do that, even with this
older radio. Some older radios you can, some of the older ones you can't. It definitely depends
on the make and model. So, of course, do your research. Now, if we pan over here, we can see
what I'm currently using is my day-to-day HF radio. And that is this right here. This is the
newer ICOM. This is an ICOM IC7300. Very, very popular radio right now. If you are getting an
HF and you can afford the around a grand on sale price tag, like it's a great radio. The feature
set you get for that is pretty good, in my opinion. You know, almost as good as some of the
much more expensive radios. This is a newer design. The actual innards of how the radio
works. This is a move to an SDR architecture, whereas this other one that we were just looking
at is a classic super heterodyning radio. So the actual method of working has been upgraded
with a newer technology. You have a lot more availability in terms of, you know,
digital filtering and things like that to pull weak signals out of noise. And so it's nice.
Interfacing with a computer on the newer radios is also a lot easier. Almost all newer radios
have a direct USB port. And so you just plug it into USB and you'll get an audio device. You'll
get a microphone and a speaker output. That's how you send audio to and from the radio. And then
usually you get a virtual serial driver as a virtual serial port that you can use your software
to control the radio with. And we'll talk more about that in a minute. And so with this, again,
you need separate power. You know, again, it still runs on that 12-volt system, 13.8, you know,
nominal, perfect, perfect world voltage. So yeah, you know, you can run it. You don't need,
you don't need wall power. I'm actually not running any of this station, any of this equipment
you see here. None of this is running off of wall power. This is actually all running off of a giant
battery that's behind there. And then it actually gets charged by a solar panel that I have sitting
outside. Just a small 100-watt panel sitting outside just charges all day when I'm not using
it. And the battery keeps me going. So that's kind of nice. You don't even have to worry about
that. You may know some stuff next to it and be wondering what these magic doohickeys are.
So, you know, you definitely need the radio. You definitely need a power source. The next sort of
thing you're going to want to look at is either you get away with either one of these. You don't
necessarily need them. This bottom unit here is what's called an antenna tuner. And so what this
does is this actually helps if your antenna is not perfect, you know, at whatever frequency you're
trying to operate it, it'll actually try to match that. Now, it's important to note that antenna
tuners are great at matching, you know, whatever you have for an antenna to your radio so your radio
is happy, but you're going to lose power. If your antenna is not good, you know, if your antenna is
not resonant, the tuner will make it match, but you're actually just going to be wasting a lot
of power in the form of heat into the antenna tuner. So you always want to get your antenna
as ideal as possible. This actually is a built-in power meter, so when you're transmitting, you
could actually see how many watts you're sending out the door, which is useful.
And a lot of radios have antenna tuners built in, especially the larger desktop units.
Oftentimes, the standalone ones can deal with worse antennas than the internal ones. They can
accommodate much, much higher, you know, mismatches. Again, your trade-off is, of course,
you're going to put a lot of power into the tuner just to get a small bit of signal out if it's not
very matched. And then finally, this piece back here... let me turn the light on. It doesn't
really come up on camera. This is a standing wave meter, an SWR meter, and a power meter all in one.
And so this will actually just has a very old-school analog instrument. Let me see if I
can get it up close here. Sorry for the reflection there. So you can see it's kind of got two needles
there. It's what's called a crossed needle display. And so when you transmit these meters,
these needles will come up. The one on the left is actually the power that you're sending out,
and the one on the back is actually telling you how much reflected power you have, how much is
coming back. Ideally, if you had a perfectly resonant antenna, you'd have no power coming
back and you'd be sending all your power out the door. That's what you want. So you want to see
generally this needle on the right down to the bottom and the other one at your power level.
But, you know, this will tell you if you're not doing that. So especially if you don't have a
tuner, you definitely at least want a meter like this so that you can see if you have a problem
and go, oh, I need to go adjust my antenna, things like that. So let's keep on moving back here. So
you can actually see some power distribution back here. So this is a power distribution block. You
obviously don't have to have anything as fancy as this. You can twist wires together with wire nuts
to start. That's totally fine. Or you can get a bit more fancy. Excuse me. And yeah, use something
like this. You'll notice these connectors back here, these red and black connectors are called
Anderson Power Pole. They've kind of become the de facto standard across Amradio. They're not
required. Each radio manufacturer kind of puts their own connector on their radios. So typically
you'll just take that, adapt it to Power Pole, and then you can connect that to your power
distribution. It is a standard for the radio emergency services groups, the areas groups. They
have standardized on Power Pole and pretty much the entire community has standardized on
these. And you can actually get the tools and you can make these connectors yourself.
Yeah, they're pretty straightforward. Let me pull one out real quick.
Yeah, so you can see kind of the edge there, you know, it's just a red and black.
Very, very simple to have sort of a spring-loaded tongue in there. The cool thing about these is
these are genderless. So there is no male connector, there is no female connector.
The Power Pole connectors will just plug into each other. Pretty awesome. There goes the radio.
So really, really recommend doing that when you get a chance. Again, it's not something
that you have to urgently do when you first get your radios and set up, but it's something you
want to do, especially for a long-term installation. It also makes it really nice when you go out into
the field and, you know, you're like, oh, hey, I need to plug in this. Anyone got a spare battery?
Almost everyone is using them. So you can go, oh, yeah, I have one. And you don't have to,
you know, try to finagle some connectors or jury-rig something with some duct tape and
baling wire. Not that we've ever done that. So in HF, the antennas are much, much bigger.
We are inside. My antenna, of course, is outside. So, you know, you have a lot of options for HF
antennas. There are, you know, of course, Yagi antennas. You know, a lot of people, of course,
in their mind have a big picture of, you know, the hammer operator is, you know, the giant Yagi
antenna on a, you know, 200-foot tower with a big rotator. And there are certainly hands that
have that, and I'm jealous of them. But you definitely don't need anything that complex.
So, you know, you can get away with just literally a random wire. It's called a random wire
antenna. And you just can put out a random length of wire and get a good ground, plug it in. You
would want to tune it with that. A very, another very popular starting antenna is what's called a
dipole, which is literally just two pieces of wire, equal length. And the cut is specific
lengths for whatever band you're trying to tune in. You throw that up, you know, in the air as
high as you can get, throw it up in a tree or throw each end up in a tree, run some coax cable back
to your radio, and you can be good. And it's really actually pretty small.
I'm looking on the back of the radio just to go over some connectors you might see.
I'll go pan real quick. So this is the older radio, but the newer radios are going to be
very, very similar. So this right here is called the UHF connector. This was, if anyone has done
CB in the past, this was the CB connector as well. That's pretty much what all desktop radios
are going to have for an antenna connection. The Ham Radio Hobby is pretty much the only one
that uses this connector anymore. It's actually a little outdated, but for whatever reason,
the Hobby has stuck with it. On mobile rigs, sometimes you'll see this. Sometimes on mobile
rigs, you'll see a BNC connector as well. And you can, of course, make adapters to all these. I
actually have one right here. You can actually see this is a small little adapter. You can plug it
right in, and then you can use a BNC antenna. Again, there's no sort of exact standard in the
field. You know, my personal recommendation is using BNC connectors on all your antennas that
are portable and using UHF or connectors for everything in your house for HF. And then just
carrying a bag of adapters. Another connector you might see is an N connector, which is slightly
different than the UHF. Of course, not quite compatible. Again, there are plenty of adapters.
You can pull this out. You can actually see here on this device here, this is a UHF connector
on the left, and this is an N connector on the right. So N, you generally only see at VHF and above.
Not so much for HF.
Moving on again, sort of power connectors you can see.
Hey folks, this is AI0J here with Ham Radio Village, and today we're going to go over a demo
of a sort of basic ham station setup. We're going to cover both VHF, UHF setups, portable setups,
handheld setups, as well as sort of a base station setup. So we've got a bunch of things to go through
here. You know, let's start with sort of the most basic and very likely the first radio you may have
as a ham would be like a handheld radio like one of these. The Baofengs are also very, very popular.
They're like $35 for an entry-level radio. I have a couple upstairs. These are great, you know,
handheld. You don't have to worry anything about them whatsoever in terms of external hookups. They
come with their own little antenna right on top, affectionately called the rubber ducky. They have
self-contained battery, you know, power button inside, pretty straightforward. You turn it on,
it's got a button just like a walkie-talkie you probably had when you were a kid. Push to talk,
you're good to go. Simple. So not much to hold a lot to talk about there. Definitely if you're
starting out, it's a great place to go. A technician license will grant you all the ability to use
these on the VHF and UHF bands, so you're good to go there. This is a very similar model to the
other one. This does DMR, which is one of the newer digital modes that's from AnyTone,
but it works other than that, you know, the same sort of way. Push to talk, simple. As you move up,
you may decide to get something more what they call a mobile station. Sorry for the camera
movement here. This is optionally designed to go into a vehicle, which is why it's called a mobile.
It's not super portable, but it's also not super heavy either. You could definitely put that in a
backpack, something of that sort, if you didn't want to fix it into a vehicle.
Has a separate detached microphone in this case. You know, this one is corded. You can actually,
this radio actually even has Bluetooth because it's fancy, so you can even use a Bluetooth
headset like it's 1990 and look all cool. This one also is VHF and UHF. It's got a very cool
color screen on here. You can change channels, things like that. I know it's a little hard to
read that on the live stream there, but you know, you can program this with your computer. It uses
a USB cable. You hook it up and you can program it to have all the channel memories, you know,
with fancy names, things like that. These have been around for a long time, mobile radios on
VHF and UHF bands. The older ones obviously aren't quite as fancy in color screens, but they work
just as well. Technology wise, you know, in terms of radio power and transmitting, they all are
going to work the same, more or less, in the VHF and UHF bands. One thing to note is these also
almost always need external power. So you can see this has a cable coming off the back for power.
Almost all ham radio equipment runs on 13.8 volts, which is standard for a vehicle to provide.
So it makes it really nice and easy. You start a standard 12-volt system that you would have in a
RV, car, maritime, any of those sort of setups, and you get to use 12-volt batteries.
So not a whole lot to say about those. The antennas that you use for VHF and UHF on a mobile,
again, those are not integrated into the unit. So you would have something separate. You can get
very small ones that can, you know, attach to the side of a vehicle and be fairly discreet.
Or you can go large and put like a big mast on the side of your house, for example. If we
slowly pan over here past that HF radio there, that large white stick right there is actually
a giant VHF-UHF. And actually that one's 220 as well. That's about a good, I think,
eight feet long or so fully assembled. That's actually in two sections right there. That's
probably on the larger end of a VHF-UHF. Most, I'd say, most typical home installs probably use
one that's literally about half that size, so about four feet tall, which is actually the VHF-UHF
I have installed currently outside. Yeah, the comment, good Lord, absolutely. That is a very
large antenna, but still generally small in terms of ham radio antennas. All right, we're going to
slowly pan back over. Yes, in the city, you know, giant antennas are definitely out of reach. You
know, your landlord is probably not going to be very happy of you sticking, you know, eight foot
pole at the side of a window. But there are actually a ton of resources online about stealth
antennas. There's actually whole books written about having stealth antennas for two meters.
There's actually some really great ideas where you can use some copper pipe and you'd make a
planter out of it. And so it looks just like a normal planter and your flower is growing on it.
It's actually an antenna. Your neighbors don't even know you can put that out in the patio.
All right, so those are pretty simple VHF and UHF radios. You know, as you get higher in license
and you, you know, maybe get your general license or maybe you're, you know, love math and you
wouldn't get your extra license. First off, congrats. You're going to want to get into the
world of HF radios. Now here's actually an HF radio that's fairly old by today's standard.
This, I think, dates back to late 70s, 80s maybe. It's made by ICOM. This is a full HF radio. It can
go from, you know, all the really lower bands, like 160 meters all the way. I think this one
goes up to, I think, 10 meter. And, you know, this is much more fully featured HF. You start
to climb in price. Unfortunately, I know everyone, you know, the question is always, oh, hey,
I want an HF radio, but I don't want to spend more than a couple hundred dollars. And that's,
it's hard to do. It is possible. Usually you're probably going to look at something like a kit
radio for that and not so much something pre-bought. You can also buy things like this
that are older and used and you get a good deal. I think this was my first HF radio I bought when
I got my general license. I paid a few hundred dollars for it from another ham. Definitely be
careful buying used equipment. Ideally, if you could get to, you know, a swap meet or something
in person, which I know is a little difficult right now, where you can actually test the radio,
plug it in, make sure it works, you know, and it doesn't immediately just like, you know,
let the magic smoke out of the box when you power it up. But a radio like this, you know,
still fully can work on everything today. Even all the new digital modes that are available and
very, very popular. You can use this for that. It's no problem. You know, you can actually,
even this radio, you can actually even control with a computer to set frequency and transmit
and all that sort of stuff. You can actually still, still do that even with this older radio.
Some older radios you can, some of the older ones you can't. It definitely depends on the
model. So, of course, do your research. Now, if we pan over here, we can see what
I'm currently using is my day-to-day HF radio. And that is this right here. This is the newer
ICOM. This is an ICOM IC7300. Very, very popular radio right now. If you are getting an HF and you
can afford the around a grand on sale price tag, like it's a great radio. The features that you
get for that is pretty good, in my opinion. You know, almost as good as some of the much
more expensive radios. This is a newer design. The actual innards of how the radio works,
this is a move to an SDR architecture. Whereas this other one that we were just looking at is
a classic super heterodyning radio. So the actual method of working has been upgraded
with a newer technology, have a lot more availability in terms of, you know,
digital filtering and things like that to pull weak signals out of noise. And so it's nice.
Interfacing with a computer on the newer radios is also a lot easier. Almost all newer radios
have a direct USB port. And so you just plug it into USB and you'll get an audio device. You'll
get a microphone and a speaker output. Then that's how you send audio to and from the radio.
And then usually you get a virtual serial driver as a virtual serial port that you can use your
software to control the radio with. And we'll talk more about that in a minute.
And so with this, again, you need separate power. You know, again, it still runs on that 12 volt
system, 13.8, you know, nominal, perfect, perfect world voltage. So yeah, you know, you can run,
you don't need, you don't need well power. I'm actually not running any of this station,
any of this equipment you see here. None of this is running off of wall power. This is actually
all running off of a giant battery that's behind there. And then this actually gets charged by a
solar panel that I have sitting outside. Just a small hundred watt panel sitting outside just
charges all day when I'm not using it and the battery keeps me going. So that's kind of nice.
You don't even have to worry about that. You may know some stuff next to it and be wondering what
these magic doohickeys are. So, you know, you definitely need the radio. You definitely need
a power source. The next sort of thing you're going to want to look at is either you get away
with either one of these. You don't necessarily need them. This bottom unit here is what's called
an antenna tuner. And so what this does is this actually helps if your antenna is not perfect,
you know, at whatever frequency you're trying to operate it, it'll actually try to match that. Now,
it's important to note that antenna tuners are great at matching, you know, whatever you have
for an antenna to your radio, so your radio is happy, but you're going to lose power. If your
antenna is not good, you know, if your antenna is not resonant, the tuner will make it match,
but you're actually just going to be wasting a lot of power in the form of heat into the
antenna tuner. So you always want to get your antenna as ideal as possible.
This actually is a built-in power meter, so when you're transmitting, you could actually see
how many watts you're sending out the door, which is useful.
And a lot of radios have antenna tuners built in, especially the larger desktop units. Oftentimes,
the standalone ones can deal with worse antennas than the internal ones. They can accommodate much,
much higher, you know, mismatches. Again, your trade-off is, of course, you're going to put a
small bit of signal out if it's not very matched. And then finally, this piece back here... let me
turn the light on it. That doesn't really come up on camera. This is a standing wave meter,
an SWR meter, and a power meter all in one. And so this will actually just has... it's a
very old-school analog instrument. Let me see if I can get up close here.
Sorry for the reflection there. So you can see it's kind of got two needles there.
It's what's called a crossed needle display. And so when you transmit these meters,
these needles will come up. The one on the left is actually the power that you're sending out,
and the one on the back is actually telling you how much reflected power you have, how much is
coming back. Ideally, if you had a perfectly resonant antenna, you'd have no power coming
back, and you'd be sending all your power out the door. That's what you want. So you want to see
generally this needle on the right down to the bottom, and the other one at your power level.
But, you know, this will tell you if you're not doing that. So especially if you don't have a
tuner, you definitely at least want a meter like this so that you can see if you have a problem
and go, oh, I need to go adjust my antenna, things like that. So let's keep on moving back here. So
you can actually see some power distribution back here. So this is a power distribution block. You
obviously don't have to have anything as fancy as this. You can twist wires together with wire
nuts to start. That's totally fine. Or you can get a bit more fancy, excuse me, and use something
like this. You'll notice these connectors back here, these red and black connectors are called
Anderson Power Pole. They've kind of become the de facto standard across Amradio. They're not
required. Each radio manufacturer kind of puts their own connector on their radios. So typically,
you'll just take that, adapt it to Power Pole, and then you can connect that to your power
distribution. It is a standard for the radio emergency services groups, the areas groups,
they have standardized on Power Pole, and pretty much the entire community has standardized
on these. And you can actually get the tools and you can make these connectors yourself.
They're pretty straightforward. Let me pull one out real quick.
So you can see kind of the edge there, you know, it's just a red and black.
Very, very simple to have sort of a spring loaded tongue in there. The cool thing about these is
these are genderless. So there is no male connector, there is no female connector,
the Power Pole connectors will just plug into each other. Pretty awesome. There goes radio.
So really, really recommend doing that when you get a chance. Again, it's not something
that you have to urgently do when you first get your radios and set up. But it's something you
want to do, especially for a long term installation. It also makes it really nice when you
go out into the field and you're like, oh, hey, I need to plug in this. So anyone got a spare
battery? Almost everyone is using them. So you can go, oh, yeah, I have one. And you don't have to
try to finagle some connectors or jury rig something with some duct tape and baling wire.
Not that we've ever done that. So in HF, the antennas are much, much bigger. We are inside,
my antenna, of course, is outside. So, you know, you have a lot of options for HF antennas.
There are, you know, of course, Yagi antennas that, you know, a lot of people, of course,
in their mind have a big picture of, you know, the hammer operator is, you know, the giant Yagi
antenna on a, you know, 200 foot tower with a big rotator. And there are certainly hams that
have that. And I'm jealous of them. But you definitely don't need anything that complex.
So, you know, you can get away with just literally a random wire. It's called a random wire antenna.
And you just can put out a random length of wire and get a good ground, plug it in. You would want
to tune it with that. A very, another very popular starting antenna is what's called a dipole, which
is literally just two pieces of wire, equal length. And it cuts to specific lengths for whatever band
you're trying to tune in. You throw that up, you know, in the air as high as you can get,
throw it up in a tree or throw each end up in a tree, run some coax cable back to your radio,
and you can be good. And it's really actually pretty small.
Looking on the back of the radio, just to go over some connectors you might see.
Go pan real quick. So this is the older radio, but the newer radios are going to be very,
very similar. So this right here is called the UHF connector. This was, if anyone has done CB
in the past, this was the CB connector as well. That's pretty much what all desktop radios are
going to have for an antenna connection. The Hammer Radio Hobby is pretty much the only one
that uses this connector anymore. It's actually a little outdated, but for whatever reason,
the Hobby has stuck with it. On mobile rigs, sometimes you'll see this. Sometimes on mobile
rigs, you'll see a BNC connector as well. And you can, of course, make adapters to all these. I
actually have one right here. You can actually see this is a small little adapter. You can plug it
right in, and then you can use a BNC antenna. Again, there's no sort of exact standard in the
field. You know, my personal recommendation is using BNC connectors on all your antennas that
are portable, and using UHF or connectors for everything in your house for HF. And then just
carrying a bag of adapters. Another connector you might see is an N connector, which is slightly
different than UHF. Of course, not quite compatible. Again, there are plenty of adapters.
I'm just going to pull this out. You can actually see here on this device here, this is a UHF
connector on the left, and this is an N connector on the right. So N, you generally only see at VHF
and above. Not so much for HF. Moving on again, sort of power connectors. You can see, again,
all the manufacturers sort of do their own power connector on the radio. And this is a big,
scary-looking six-pin block. It actually just uses two pins, positive and negative. And then,
almost all desktop HF radios will have an accessory port of some kind. This one's an old
Molex. A lot of radios use a variation of a DIN connector. And in the manuals, of course, we'll
have all the pinouts. You often don't need to worry too much about these, unless you need some
of the signaling out of here. This older radio, if you want to pull audio out to use digital modes,
you can pull the audio off of this connector and not even have to tap into the microphone
connector on the front, which is nice. And most radios have some sort of control port.
This is a serial port here. It has a phone plug style. Newer radios will just have a USB port,
which makes it super, super easy. And then, depending on your rig, you may have some
additional ports or some stuff here that, as a beginner, you don't really need to worry a whole
lot. You could actually have separate, basically, transverter boards. You could take a signal coming
in, process it through a separate piece of equipment, and send it back to the radio.
Not something you generally need to worry about as a new ham at all.
Following up on a question on Twitch, this is a not... I'm not sure I understand the
advantage of the power distribution block. Is it mostly for different connection types?
Yeah, so one of the things we do have to be aware of when we're dealing with any
power source is protection. And so, if we go back and take a look real quick, back at this block.
On this one, you'll actually notice that, above these, these are all individual fuses,
and they're actually all different values. So, when you're dealing with a big, large 12-volt
battery or a 12-volt source, if you touch the two wires together, you're going to put a lot
of current through that wire very, very quickly, and you could short things out, melt the wire,
cause a fire. All bad things we don't want to happen. So, an advantage of a big block like this
is you can actually have different level of fuses for each thing. So, like the ones in the left,
the one all the way to the left is the input, and that thing is at the 40-amp fuse, and then I think
it's 20-amp fuses for these larger HF radios, and then like the charging bases for the handhelds
are like, you know, 1-amp fuses. So, that way, you just don't have to worry about it. Again,
you don't necessarily need to go to that level, but you, at the very least, no matter what, if
you're literally just, you know, wiring your battery directly to your radio, it's very, very,
very important you at least put some sort of fuse in there. That way, if you have a short circuit,
it just blows the fuse, it costs you 30 cents, and nothing gets damaged. Great, great question.
So, yeah, so some other things to talk about. You know, the other really important sort of
thing for a ham station is most people have a computer attached.
Yeah, inline fuses on all the wires is also a totally valid option, nothing wrong with that.
You know, you definitely want to have a computer attached if you want to do any of the digital
modes. And, you know, any computer, a lot of the ham radio software is written for Windows,
a fair amount of everyone does XP, but it still runs on Windows 10, no problem.
There is totally software for Linux, and probably Mac is the least supported,
although I think there is a larger and more diverse set of software for that now than there
has been. The advantages of using a computer is not only just control the radio, so you can
actually say, okay, I want to use my computer and say, go to this specific frequency. I want to,
you know, have this generate the digital mode signals, things like that. You can also record
directly off of that. For VHF and UHF radios, especially, you can use your computer to program
memory, so you don't have to, like, try to program every frequency and offset, like with the two
knobs in the front of your radio, because that's just not very fun, especially if you want to
program a bunch of stuff. And not a whole lot to say about that, it does not have to be a very
powerful computer, you know, any laptops, totally fine, as long as you get some USB.
And so now I just want to talk about a couple accessories. Again, we talked about power a bit,
so let me pull this off here. And as I mentioned before, I'm running this setup entirely off a
solar panel and a large battery. There's a very, very large battery hiding here in the corner.
I think it's Duracell's largest AGM battery they make. But you certainly don't need anything that
big at all. You can use a regular, any 12-volt battery, things from, you know, even like a
motorcycle ATV. If you're going to be doing portable operations, something like a lithium
battery. Lithium is a lot lighter than that giant lead-acid battery. That battery is super heavy,
you know, this battery I can hold up with a finger, which is nice. The downside is,
of course, lithium batteries cost a lot more money than a lead-acid battery or an AGM.
And, of course, you don't have to run off a battery at all. You can absolutely buy any sort
of, you know, 12-volt supplies. This is the one that I sometimes use with my station here. This
is actually designed for an RV. This is an RV power supply, so it's actually designed to charge
a battery and provide 12 volts for a camper. It actually works really, really well. You can,
of course, get fancy made, you know, ones for ham radio that have, you know, very cool dials in the
front or gauges, you know, power meters, things like that. A lot of them even have
powerbolt connectors now on the front directly, which is convenient. But you don't definitely
have to go that route. Really, anything that gives you 12 volts is good or 13.8 nominal.
One thing to be aware of, you know, I've seen a lot of people, you know, use old computer power
supplies, and that certainly can work. You do have to be careful with any power supply
on the electrical noise that they make. Some power supplies can be very noisy
electrically, and that'll make it much, much harder to tune signals at HF. VHF and UHF,
it's usually not an issue. But as you start needing HF bands, you become much, much more
sensitive to electrical noise. And that's actually why I try to operate off a battery
all at all times, because then there's just no line noise at all. There's no connection to the
grid. All right, so that pretty much covers what you need. A couple other nice things to have.
If you can have something, this is called an antenna analyzer. I'm just getting real close
here. Again, this is sort of a fancy one. You definitely don't need anything super fancy.
If you are part of a local ham club, a lot of times your club will actually have one that,
you know, you can take on loan. This is good when you're setting up new antennas,
especially if you're building antennas. This becomes almost essential.
You can plug your antenna directly into here and you can see if it tunes and see how good it is.
We can grab one real quick and test. Let me put this little adapter back on. So we can actually
pull the antenna off this radio or in my shirt here. All right, so we can actually hook up. This
is my antenna to the side and you can immediately see atop these needles change, right? So they're
infinite, right? We're definitely not getting anything. We connected it. And this works
similar to the way the other meter we looked at earlier. The difference is this is, you know,
you sort of connect it for testing. This one over here actually stays connected all the time and
you run your signals through that, whereas this you do not. So you can see here we can actually
adjust which frequency. I know it's a little hard to see that display. There we go a little bit.
But this one's just a nice little LCD display at the bottom where it shows the frequency that
you're trying to test. And then you can, you know, you can see as we move around and the band,
if we get to somewhere right in the middle of the 20 meter band, which is 14 megahertz,
you can see the SWR is really dropping down. It's still not perfect in this antenna. It's
a 1.5 SWR. You'd ideally want that to be one, but you can see it is tuning right here at 50.
So just a good thing that, you know, again, if you're building antennas, it's definitely something
worth the investment to buy. You know, you don't find anything quite this fancy. There are plenty
of things, plenty of options on the market. Again, used is totally fine. Ask around, you know,
if you have a ham friend in the area or a club, they might have one and you can just borrow it.
If you're using a commercial off-the-shelf antenna that you've bought, you can probably
get away with that one for a bit. But it is important to know with even a pre-bought antenna
that, you know, your installation conditions are going to affect that. So if it's not as high as
ideal or, you know, it's not in the right shape, you know, you may actually not tune as well as
you might think. All right, just looking at some questions. How much have you spent on all your
gear? I don't have to answer that question. I assume you're a plant for my wife. No, I mean,
you know, like any hobby, it can get expensive, you know, or, you know, you can try to be as cheap
as you want and do a lot of kit building, things like that. So yeah, I mean, it's been over several
years and probably, I don't know, several thousand dollars. I don't know. But yeah, yeah. I think
that's about it. I don't see any other questions in the chat. So thanks for tuning in. Hopefully
this was helpful. If you do have any further questions, we can... you can drop them in the chat
and I'll answer you. Oh, actually, we do have one coming in. Do you use a grounding block? That is
actually a great point I totally forgot about. No matter what you do, you definitely... system
grounding is very, very important, both for lightning protection and to keep our stray RF
currents in at bay. So yeah, that's a great question. So I do actually have a grounding
block. It's on the outside of this house here. Let me go back. Now if we pan up, we can actually
see my RF cable is going to a mysterious hole in the wall there. That actually goes to the
outside walls and outside wall in front of us. And I have an entrance panel there that has a big
copper sheet and actually has some lightning arresters mounted in there. So they do have a
full grounding block and there's... it's tied to the house grounding system, to the grounding rods.
Very, very important. You want good ground for your system and you want it to be the same ground as
your house. You do not want to have your home electrical ground and your antenna grounds be
different. That's just going to ask for trouble and or could be dangerous. So there definitely
is a whole bunch of resources on grounding. The ARRL actually has a book out in a letter
just called Grounding and Bonding for the Amateur Radio, I think is what it's called. And I highly
recommend that. It goes into very, very deep detail on how to design ground systems that are
effective and how to stay safe, things like that. All right, not seeing anything else. So if you
have any questions, I will be on Discord, on the DEF CON Discord. So feel free to drop in,
ask any questions and I'll follow up there. Thanks for watching, guys!