To start off, this isn't an antenna modeling program. Rather, it's a tool I'm developing to help visualize and better understand how different variables affect an antenna's radiation pattern.

For example, in the animation above, you can see how the radiation pattern changes as a V-dipole is progressively raised above the ground.

Personally, being able to watch the lobes stretch, shift, and eventually split into additional lobes as the antenna moves beyond its ideal height makes the concept much easier to grasp. It's one thing to compare static radiation plots at two or three different heights, but actually seeing the pattern evolve in real time gives you a much better understanding of what's happening.

The goal is to make antenna behavior a little more intuitive, especially for those of us who learn better by seeing things in action rather than staring at charts and numbers.

Anyway, I'd love to hear what you all think! I'm still working on adding a few features before releasing it, but I wanted to share a preview and get some feedback from the community. I dont want to start entering the realms of antenna modeling but if theres some specific antennas youd like to see amd specific changes in those antennas please let me know!

73, SummitRadio

My son (10) wanted to mount his ht on the wall near his bed so I gave it to him as a project. He drew then modeled it in TinkerCAD before slicing and sending it to the printer. He’s had his tech license for about 4 months and is so excited to put his 3D printer to work for his amateur radio hobby. This was his first time designing his own part and he knows it’s basic but he knows it serves the purpose. Not too shabby for a 10 year old!

(I’m posting this here so he can see the comments.)

They make 10 meter radios for 10 meters wink wink with SSB and other modes, but why not these 6 meter ones? No one seems to use 6 meters FM even when 6 meters is good, so who on Earth are these radios for? I'd really like to get on, but the only way seems to be an all band, all mode, which I'm not too keen on..

I’m positive I could ask AI to create one for me, but I would like something maintained by humans! I want to be able to better plan time off requests from work around contests, since I work a lot of weekends. However, if such a calendar already exists that I can subscribe to with my Mac and iPhone via iCal, I don’t have to go build the thing myself!
Thanks in advance!

Had a birthday and sold my motorcycle, so I turned all my cash and gifts to HF radio stuff.

I am absolutely the person to jump in and then try to swim lol.

So I got a trusdx radio and a G90. I built an EFHW wire antenna. I also got a NanoVNA....

What I dont have is trees lol. Nor do I have a ham shack. The room I use as my office is on the front side of the house and the best place for antennas is the back yard. I built the EFHW as a more portable thing, but didn't think it through lol and it's a lot of wire that doesn't have trees to go into.

I bought a painters pole to try and raise one end, well because of the wind we have here, it'll dang near need to be a permanent installation....which is not good for a painters pole....sigh....

So then I started thinking about a 4x4 post at the very far end of my yard and the other end connected to my house....that still lands me on the opposite side of my house to my office.

I've got radios and wires and crap all over my desk. I've got no real plan or ideas how to do any of this and I guess I'm looking for ideas.

When I search the googles I get a lot of cartoon drawings that always seem to involve a two story house.

I'm at the wonderful intersection of no knowledge/idea what I'm doing and very little patience because I want to get some HF radio sounds coming in....

Help. Inspiration. Ideas. Anything from the ham community. If you're wondering how treeless and how much wind...Texas Panhandle. TIA

Bonjour à tous les radioamateurs et amateurs de radio.

Je vous propose un lien pour les Applis radioamateur.

Catégories.

FT8 et FT4, propagation, satellites, répéteurs, carnet de trafic, Pota et SOTA, DMR – D-STAR – C4FM – RÉSEAUX, SSTV, outils, SDR, GPS, Audio et conception des antennes.

Recevez mes 73 — bonne visite.

Applications mobiles pour radioamateurs – 2026

Does anyone have any good resources to help me fill in a basic knowledge gap that I have?

I'm a big diy-er and when I look up different antenna designs I see stuff about ununs, baluns, and transformmers to match impedance or remove noise. For whatever reason I just have a hard time understanding what they are doing and what would be appropriate in a given condition.

Any basic knowledge resources that anyone knows of would be very much appreciated.

For context, I'm mainly looking at receiving only on the HF bands (since a radio that can transmit on these bands are pretty pricey). I have a decent understanding of basic electronics but mainly DC rather than AC.

I know that "just google it" is an option, but I've tried that and am still confused. I'm basically looking for information on the level of a dumb college student or a smartish high school student.

Thanks in advance!

What’s a good used or new all mode radio with 2meter SSB base or mobile that can be found for under $1000

It's a big upgrade, and the most noticeable change is the channel editor. It now edits more like a spreadsheet. Click a cell and type, or paste a list of frequencies from Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets straight into a bank.

If you have multiple scanners, you can swap them without restarting, name each one, and give your banks nicknames.

There's a long list of fixes, too. The changelog has them all, if that's your thing.

If you're on 1.1.1 or later, you'll get the update notice the next time you open Bearpaw. Everyone else can grab it at bearpaw.app.

Disclosure: I'm the developer, it's my own app, and this post was written with AI help.

I made a free iPhone and iPad flashcard app for things you need to know by a fixed date. A license exam with a public question pool is a good fit, so I'm looking for a few people studying for Technician, General or Extra to test it.

One card from your own list sits on your Lock Screen widget. Each time you pick up your phone, you see it, answer in your head, tap to check, then grade it right on the widget. No app to open, no study session to plan.

How it works:

• paste your list, one card per line, for example "Ohm's law: E = ? - I × R"
• take the questions and answers from the current pool, so the answers are the ones on the exam
• set your exam date, and spaced repetition (FSRS) spreads the reviews over the days left: the questions you miss come back more often

Free, no account, no in-app purchases, no ads.

What it doesn't do: it has no pool built in and no practice exams in the real exam format. Sites like HamStudy already do that well. This is for the extra reps in between, on the questions you keep missing.

See how it looks: https://terminus-cards.pages.dev/?tag=reddit-hamradio Or join the beta right away on TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/2EXRDF27

For those who passed: which part of the pool took you the most reps?

Recently I have some friends punch their tickets as Techs (hosted a flower pot antenna night and it was great 2m antenna building, j-pole vs flower pot : r/HamRadio and encouraged some antenna deep dives on design) and this has got me interested in 2m/70cm again. I have a vx-6r as an HT that has been great for hiking over the years. Recently I came across a decent local deal ($200) for a used Yaesu FT2dr. I've been debating it. I know before anyone says 2m is dead and spend the money on HF, that a lot of people's priorities are there. In the Seattle area there is actually a decent community of activity on 2m for my commute (shout out to PSRG).

Anyway, to my question. Those that are still rocking the older and outdated FT2dr, do you still like them? Dual receive, battery life, and APRS all sound good to me. Yaesu build quality also helps. I know its outdated and the FT5dr is the current king of Yaesu HTs.

So im not actually using the mast for ham radio but it is a heavy duty 12m radio mast that i am using. I need to suspend a small environmental monitor 8m high, which im planning to do with the mast. My question is how far away do the guy lines need to be from the mast and how big/deep do the pegs/ground anchors need to be? The mast will have some form of tripod but the mast needs to stay up for atleast a month so i cant rely on that alone. I also cant secure it to anything.

Any help or guidance is much appreciated.

At first I was going to use off-the-shelf GaN switches and drivers, but I'm worried that the drivers wouldn't be able to handle switching that quickly and precisely. (To operate in Class E at 6m, the full cycle is on the order of 10 ns, and I was hoping for hitting 2m, 1.25m, and 70cm, which would likely require the devices to switch in tenths of nanoseconds.)

Yet at the same time, the QMX is able to transmit at 6m using regular old MOSFETs and discrete logic, according to the schematic. I figured that a GaN with an integrated driver that doesn't have to fight PCB trace parasitics would be able to switch a whole lot faster, and they're only about $7 a pop even in small runs, but the datasheets I looked at have hundreds of ns of latency and are intended for switching frequencies below the 50 MHz required to hit 6m.

(As for why I'm doing this: [WA1QIX](https://classeradio.com/)'s polar amplifier can't hit frequencies that high, and the QMX+ is 5W max.)

QSSTV-Experimental is an amateur-radio program for sending and receiving SSTV (slow-scan television) and HAMDRM / DSSTV (digital SSTV) pictures using a sound card. It is compatible with most of MMSSTV and EasyPal. Substantial changes have been made versus upstream QSSTV.

All original QSSTV features are still available. See the README.md for details.

Changes versus upstream QSSTV 9.5.11

Platforms

• Windows (64-bit, 10 1809 or later, or 11)
• Linux AppImage (x86_64/arm64 - Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 39 or similar and later)
• macOS (macOS 15 or later, Intel or Apple Silicon, should work but untested. No hardware.)

New Features

• Sample-rate calibration - from WWV time ticks, NTP, or a reference SSTV station
• Decode SSTV from audio files - (WAV, MP3, FLAC, OGG, AAC), from the GUI (*File > Decode SSTV From File...*) at about 10x real time, or from the command line with `qsstv-experimental --batch`
• New SSTV modes - *JB60*, a ~61 s 640*496 color mode (still in development), and *PD120W*, a 16:9 widescreen PD120
• Stitched grid images - transmit pictures as 1x2, 2x1 or 2x2 grids on the higher resolution SSTV modes and DRM
• Pan/Zoom images for transmission - Place images exactly how you want them in-frame (and in grids) before transmission
• Gallery multi-select - to delete or send several images to TX, with the Del key for quick deletion
• WebP, AVIF and HEIC support
• Image viewer zoom and pan
• Clipboard support - copy (anywhere)/paste into the transmit window or TX stock
• ADIF logbook broadcast over UDP - on every OS
• DRM Live size-slider preview - preview updates as the slider is dragged
• DRM Progressive Image Reception - Image previews as you receive, improving in quality over time
• Follows Desktop Themes

See the GitHub for ALL the changes.

BIG Thank you to WA8LMF, KC8LOQ, and KF8GTK for lots and lots of testing.

Have fun! I did.

Jay NT0Y

https://github.com/jbdubbs/QSSTV-Experimental

Next Saturday, October 24th, special event station K1MFD goes live from the summit of West Peak in Meriden to celebrate 175 years of the Meriden Department of Fire & Emergency Services (1851–2026).

To mark the milestone, every station logged will receive a custom digital commemorative certificate. We just finished up the image generation script, once the event is complete it should just be a quick ADIF export and emails will be sent.

Operational Details:
• Date & Time: Saturday, October 24 | 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM EDT (1500 – 2000 UTC)
• Location: West Peak / Hanging Hills, Meriden, CT (Grid FN31nn)
• Dual Activation: POTA US-4561 | SOTA W1/HH-004
• Planned Bands & Modes: 40m, 20m, 15m, and 10m Phone (SSB); 146.520 FM Simplex and 144.200 SSB; periodic SSTV passes on 14.230 and 7.171 MHz

Chaser Note:
Certificates will be generated automatically and delivered to the email address on your QRZ profile. If your QRZ email is outdated or marked private, take a quick moment today to update it so your certificate lands cleanly after the activation.

Hope to catch ya Saturday!

Hello Dear HamRadio operators,

I would like to invite all of you to come see and test my new platform. www.dxrank.net

I built it around a permanent and temporary performance based ranking system that gives points to each QSO made based on many factors, that mostly indicate how difficult/unique that QSO was, like how wide the bandwidth, analogic vs digital modes, what distance, how was the band condition and more.
The all time rank, is permanent and always attached to one callsign. The temporary rank is based on a time filter: 30min, 1 day etc. and shows you the best operators of that time frame.

Every rank is awarded a visual rank badge for easy identification and recognition.

And it's just the start.

The Live QSO map is a live world map, interactive based for all live-real time incoming qsos, where you can filter, select and see callsign locations and more.

Currently the live QSO are derived from online logging platforms but not only, see below.

Alongside that there are various graphs that show you the current QSO rate inbound.

After that i created also a user menu, with useful tools for various tasks.

The ADIF Score let's you merge your existing adi record to the platform, so even if you don't log QSO online automatically, you can still update the platform manually similar to QRZ.com, the eligible qso from 12 Oct 2026 onward will be merged to you rank and points.

Additionally i have prepared Pro Tools access, some of which are ready like the ADIF PRO tool, which is based on a previous program of mine, basically is the master ADI analysis tool, where you can pull precise stats and graphs of your radio activity, export to cabrillo, PDF reports and more.

There is a lot more on the platform that i can explain here, i invite you to come over and enjoy it, is absolutely all free and ads and spam free. With exception for the pro tools access in the future.

Come over and let me know your thoughts. 73

Marco

Good morning- been attempting to wire the business end of a Radiodan rbi-1 keying buffer interface to a Texas Star 350HDV. Have allready put a custom entry point for it with RCA jack (female) mounted to the backplate with + and - wiring out the back of the jack. I believe the -should wire direct to the spot where main -black goes to the pad of the unit if not I have a chassis self tap screw to mount it to. I know for the positive+ it's where the keying sniffer transistor is. which is the one closest to the backplate. But online info is sketchy and confusing, as I've read contradicting advice to solder to the emitter. also the base, hell, even one that said the collector. And so do they mean removing the transistor entirely? Therefore solder this +wire to the spots where the transistor would have been, or transistor points having some of the 3 legs up in the air while other leg(a) to the board with the + soldered to the leg? Any legit knowledge lent on this subject would be very helpful and I appreciate it in advance. I did have an elmer I could turn to but, unfortunately he passed away becoming a silent key about a year ago, he'd been a licensed operator since 1959 and made many contributions to the hobby so he always told me if I couldn't find him, this would be the next best place to try. Again I appreciate you all in advance with your time. Respectfully-Adam

I just got this project AL811H from a buddy of mine, It's been converted to 572 tubes and has a long list of upgrades.

Looking at it so far, it has the step start upgrade, grid overload protection and front panel ALC mod.

It looks like it just needs tubes, a parasitic suppressor harness, setup, and maybe an RF interconnect braid wire.

Can't wait to get it fixed up and get on the air.

Hi, im after some advice, im currently studying for my intimidate license in the UK.

I am looking to upgrade from a g90 to an ftdx 10 and im wondering if this psu will be suitable for up to 100w.

It is listed as 20 amp continuous and 30 amp surge.

Tia 😊

NOT POSSIBLE 😂

When you bring home a piece of gear that spent years transmitting inside ARRL headquarters, you can’t help but wonder if it still remembers where it came from. This morning, the newest addition to the Box 324 Radio Club bench proved that radios have a funny way of finding their way back home.

Rewind to this past weekend at the Nutmeg Hamfest. We were walking the floor when we spotted our buddies John and Josh! We were on the hunt for a new full-power rig for the club and they had exactly what we were looking for: a clean, heavy-duty Icom IC-756PROII. But this wasn't just any hamfest find. Tucked into its pedigree was a legendary piece of Connecticut radio history—it was an official bulletin radio straight out of W1AW in Newington.

We talk a lot about the big-picture work the League does on the front lines: defending amateur spectrum, fighting legislative battles, and pushing the hobby forward. But their equipment surplus cycle deserves just as much credit. When the ARRL rotates out station gear at local hamfests, it creates a vital pipeline for grassroots clubs like ours. Running a small local club station means every penny counts, and getting access to proven, well-cared-for commercial gear is a genuine game-changer. Instead of gathering dust in a backroom, gear like this gets recycled right back into the community—anchoring a club shack, training operators, and standing ready for emergency communications.

We hauled the radio back to the station and got right to work. We set it up on the bench stacked with our Sky Toppower supply and a classic RIGblaster we scored at the fest. We connected the audio cables, and got the entire station wired up and playing nice.

We’ve been putting the rig through its paces under our club call, K1MFD, but the real highlight is captured in the clip above: scheduling and completing a contact straight back across the state to W1AW.

A former W1AW bulletin workhorse, picked up from the hamfest tables, wired onto our bench, and reaching right back out to talk to its old home station. You couldn’t design a more satisfying full-circle moment.

Club Page: https://www.facebook.com/K1MFD

Huge thanks to everyone involved. If you hear K1MFD out across the bands, throw your call into the mix—this radio has plenty of history left to make. 73!