Its Quiet ... too quiet ... only the jungle drums ....
Have always been an HF guy, on and off for many years. License lapsed, stuck with CB/11m as it was convenient, again on and off for 40 plus years.
So with the solar cycle at the bottom, and only the "loud and proud crowd" shouting out on 11m with a kw or more, its not easy to talk local with some guy in California, Louisiana or North Carolina stepping on everyone from anywhere from about 700 to 2000 miles away.
Got back into the HAM game, got my General and working on the Extra, etc.
With it being near-dead on 10m - 12m Can't afford an all-mode 20m rig so I decided to invest 25 bucks into a small Baofeng 2m hand held. Its the ultimate QRP about anything smaller would be a CW rig.
So far results are good. I'm hitting repeaters no problem using a twin lead J pole I put together hanging indoors. No problem using the Nagoya 771 whip I got from China for about 3 bucks. Honestly this is about the cheapest new rig I've ever seen. Well worth the money for a little toy that actually works. True you can do better but ... if you don't have cash to lay out for Alinco, Yaesu or any other brand, this will do for the moment.
But ... other than WBUG checking in for traffic network and general announcements every evening about 6 pm, I'm not getting much action on the repeaters. Simplex is active but you need some serious wattage to get out, so I'll build a ground plane for this unit and see if I can make it out further and maybe hear some simplex out there on 2m.
70cm seems dead. I've scanned it on short steps and nada.
The most contact I got was mobile on 10m when I parked in the middle of a saline dry lake area in the back country of Death Valley, and managed to pick up a station in Hong Kong transmitting off a high rise balcony there. They were trying to make contact with Australia and somehow we got about 3 minutes of chatter before the propagation dissipated. Did that with 60 watts of power.
And what the heck is Dstar?
