New to the hobby.

[crabby62]

Brand new to sw/scanner listening. It's been 55 years since I listened to our old shortwave in the farm dining room. Now I am starting out with a IC R70 and a BC895XTL. I just ordered the ARRL antenna and radio books, used from Amazon.
As I have unlimited space in back of our house, a long wire and scanner antenna will go up.
I would like to know if the lead in wiring from the antenna masts will have to be amplified? How do other people move signals from a down-lead to the radios?
Sorry about the dumb questions, no hams nearby.
Thanks, Thom

 

[SCPD]

Give this a read. It should help answer some of your questions:

http://www.dxengineering.com/pdf/Choosing the Correct Balun.pdf

Check out their web site as they have good products. A bit on the expensive side, but their products do work well and last a lifetime.

 

[crabby62]

The information you provided, doesn't make much sence to me. What I need to find out is when I run coax 50' from mast to house, 20' to wall, 30' to bench, does the signal need amplification? I will only be receiving signals. Thanks for any help.

 

[patrauma_nurse]

Ok. so I have a question. I am new to digital scanning with a uniden bearcat bc396xt scanner upgraded from a old radio shack analog. I have downloaded both bctool and freescan software. Which is better to use? If I download programming into the scanner from one of these sites, then do I need to worry about manually programming ID talkgroups, hex/dec info, or other information? Any help with programming would be great. I did read easier to read manual from marksscanners.com and still confused. I am great at saving lives, but evidently stink at programming. Thanks.

 

[KD2DLL]

Ok. so I have a question. I am new to digital scanning with a uniden bearcat bc396xt scanner upgraded from a old radio shack analog. I have downloaded both bctool and freescan software. Which is better to use? If I download programming into the scanner from one of these sites, then do I need to worry about manually programming ID talkgroups, hex/dec info, or other information? Any help with programming would be great. I did read easier to read manual from marksscanners.com and still confused. I am great at saving lives, but evidently stink at programming. Thanks.

To address your question, I would use Freescan. I personally use freescan and Arc XT. If you are to download programming from this site (premium subscription required) you would not need to manually program TGIDs or anything else unless you wish to modify the alpha tags. Without a premium subscription, you could use the "ez import" or whatever it's call (not near my laptop) to copy and then import information into freescan from the DB on here.

Let me know if that helped.

 

[KD2DLL]

The information you provided, doesn't make much sence to me. What I need to find out is when I run coax 50' from mast to house, 20' to wall, 30' to bench, does the signal need amplification? I will only be receiving signals. Thanks for any help.

Ideally I would use one continuous piece of coax. The connectors used to link coax can be lossy depending on the brand. I would not think the signal would need amplification since you are receiving only.

 

[Rt169Radio]

Yup, KD2DLL is correct. I would only use one line of coax for your scanner antenna. If you have any signal receive problems you could always add a amplifier at the scanner end of the coax.