After a few years of lurking on the local repeaters when commuting I picked up a little HT this spring. I was motivated to do this after the first major storm of the season had me running from the car to the porch to the basement to the car to the porch….
The only working ham radio I had was mobile in the sense that it is hooked up in the car but not really mobile for my needs during a weather event. While I believe there isn’t much my car can’t do, I am aware that it can’t fit down the stairs to the basement. I also have to park it up against the house to protect it from hail. This means that during storms I end up missing out on the most current weather information going on over the SkyWarn net. With SkyWarn local ham operators team up with the NWS to position trained spotters who share information in real time in a formal ham net.
So I bought the HT. It arrived the day before the very worst storm of the season…so far. This was fortuitous. From my desk at work I could give accurate information to Elizabeth at home about what the storm was doing. When the sirens were being sounded for straightline winds I told Elizabeth that she didn’t need to pet wrangle and head to the basement for that since we’re sheltered by a ridge from that direction. I was able to tell her when the front would hit our house accurately to within five minutes. On the drive home I learned which streets to avoid and when I needed to dive into a parking garage to avoid large hail.
Seriously, ham radio still has advantages in this day of ubiquitous cell coverage and 24/7 weather news.
Anyway, this experience prodded me to be more active on the local ham scene. Now that I’m not tied to the car I can participate in local nets even if I’m not actively commuting other places. I’ve joined up with SWIARC and attended a few entertaining meetings. The presentation the last few months has been on the history of radio and ham radio in the United States. It’s fascinating the degree to which WWI and the sinking of the Titanic played a role in radio development. It’s also indicative of one of the first real crowd-sourced research efforts with much of the useful discovery being performed by enthusiasts.
This also renewed my interest in setting up an HF base station. To that end I spent the next few months researching used radios and set my sights on an FT-990. The FT-990 is no longer in production but trolling various ham classified sites and eBay shows there is still an active secondary market in these. If there’s a market for an item out-of-production, it’s probably a pretty decent item to own. Appealing to me is the split operation, the solid state finals (as opposed to vacuum tubes), and an affective integrated antenna matcher.
The antenna matcher (tuner) is important for a station like mine in that the traditional dipole antenna for some of the lower ham bands would not fit on the property on which our house sits. I also don’t have a lot of space to hang a large number of separately tuned dipoles so compromises need to be made.
An antenna needs to be tuned?! Oh yes it does. And that is a whole separate post in and of itself.
With a compromise antenna I’ll get a much wider coverage but at the cost of not being properly tuned to any particular frequency. Hence the antenna tuner.
Solid state finals are an odd requirement given I have a natural predilection for older technologies when it comes to sound. In this case however tubes present some significant drawbacks in my opinion. While they do produce a warmer, fuller sound, they are energy inefficient as compared to a transistor. Related, tubes are no longer widely produced so parts for older radios that use tubes are much harder to find parts for and repair. And finals are probably the most frequent source of breakdown since they’re the interface between the antenna and the internal workings of the radio.
Split operation is important for DXing for REASONS. One appealing aspect of the hobby to me is pulling distant stations from the fog of RF noise. Growing up in a relatively small town but with big city aspirations, I did as much of this as I could with the limited budget of a child. The only way to get any exposure to hockey in those days was to try to pull in WGN for the Blackhawks or, even better, was to manage to find KMOX to hear the Blues. KMOX was especially difficult as I usually had to find the most southeasterly corner of the house, conveniently enough my bedroom, and get the antenna as high into the air as I could. Hence me sitting on my desk with my arm up in the air holding a dinky transistor radio. To this day I’ll plonk around the AM band when driving around at night just to see what I can find.
Most importantly of all, however, is that the FT-990 is a Yaesu product. In my short time in the ham universe I’ve worked with Kenwood and Yaesu radios. In that short time I’ve just naturally gravitated in Yaesu direction. They’ve been remarkably more robust which is important to a klutz like me. They seem to receive excellent reviews generally and their layouts just feel more intuitive to me.
So all of that being said, I finally found an FT-990 in my price range a few weeks ago. Yes, right in the middle of the giant Elizabeth in the Hospital Fiasco of 2014. This radio arrived last Friday and I thoroughly enjoyed unpacking it. So much so I didn’t take the time to document this momentous occasion with pictures or video. For the moment this radio sits while I procure an acceptable power supply. Once that arrives I’ll be on the air with my crappy single wire antenna.
I’m looking forward to publishing more exploits of distance radio communication.
