It’s a beauty
By sa6ham
I’m loving this! I’m so very happy with my acquisition. 🙂
On the way home from picking up this Kenwood TS-570D, I stopped by my friend SA6ANW. After we had a bite to eat, we drove to another ham who had the largest collection of ham stuff in his basement. I ended up buying a starter set of things from him!
So, there’s my radio and mic in the bottom left corner, two large rolls of coax in the upper left, a box containing a multimeter and a bunch of coax contacts, a ~40 meter dipole (haven’t measured, but the auto tuner succeeds at 6-8MHz), a roll of thin wire – for antennas – in the top right corner, a VHF/UHF antenna even farther to the right, and – finally – a loaner 13.8V 30A power source for the radio. That SWR meter in between the coax and the wire roll is also a loaner.
I rolled out the dipole throughout my house (it’s long!) and connected it to my radio using the cable from the SWR meter. After a lot of fiddling and figuring out of controls, I actually managed to hear three different Italian hams! That’s like somewhere between 1 283,16 and 2 400,04 km (797,32 and 1 491,32 miles) so it’s really amazing to me.
I didn’t dare try to transmit with the antenna on the floor and me not knowing where the cat was. Tonight, I’ll get the dipole and vhf/uhf antenna up on the roof. Perhaps today is the day I make my first QSO! 😀