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thehustler posted:M3IIG listening through... M3YSA returning... As you can tell from the callsign, I'm also just a foundation licensee, but I'd like to become intermediate and eventually advanced. The problem with that in my area, though, is that you have to wait for months before a course becomes available, and then (at least with my local club) it's £75 and you have to sit through 2 weekends of stuff you most likely already know from the internet. In fact, when I took the foundation course, the tutor sat and read through the entire 23-page license terms and conditions with us for a couple of hours :-/ Does anyone know of anywhere in the UK which will just let you sit the test for the license, without a 4-day course accompanying it? Anyway, I'm using an Icom IC-725 for HF stuff and some crappy chinese HT for 2m. I have line-of-sight to the local 2m repeater, which is nice, but the chinese thing fails at identifying CTCSS tones in incoming transmissions. It can send them fine, and open up the repeater, but then squelches out any responses. I'm also too lazy to build a 1750Hz tone generator. This all culminates in me trying to whistle the right frequency and sounding like an rear end. Due to still living with my parents, my options for antenna location are rather limited. I do have a 20m-long dipole (resonant on 40m band) strung between some trees, but it's at a lower height than the house, which I'm sure doesn't help the signal propagation at all. I've managed to contact some hams about 1500km away, but I don't operate very often because I have no idea what to talk about after initiating contact with someone. It's kind of like having really bad quality phone conversations with old people, where you can't hear what they're saying half the time. Still good fun, though. dah-di-dah
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Apr 17, 2008 15:48
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 17:36 |
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