I passed my intermediate a couple of years back. I loved both the foundation and intermediate training. Great teachers, interesting topics.
I’ve tried a few times to get on the air (mostly vhf due to lack of space), and every time without fail, the people on the other end are, well… not particularly welcoming, and on occasion quite rude to newbies.
I’m considering going for a full license, just because the learning is fun. But after that, I don’t know if I’ll ever make use of it.
Can anyone here recommend ways to use my intermediate (and eventually hopefully full) licence to communicate with people who aren’t unkind?
I realise that not all operators are like this, I think I’ve just been unlucky.
Yes you have def been unlucky. But such users are annoying. And a harm to the ham community in general.
In all honesty the most common and best advice to avoid them. Has always been turn the dial. This is harder if you are linited to VHF. As that often means local repeaters are a huge part of the experience. These tend to foster communities with certain behaiviors. If you can find a local repeater with echo link that will provide a greater variety. Or the newer fusion (yaesu only) d-star or dmr.
But honnestly HF is best. Look into an end fed long wire/inverted L. With a tuner such antennas are very easy to hide. And can be used on most hf bands. Remote tunner is best. But others including a cheap manual work. Other then the tuner. These are easy and cheap to build /hide yourself. Basically 40m wire and a 9:1 bolan (can be relaced with a good remote tuner as I have done). Much shorter wire can be used. But the low bands like 160m and 80m will be hard to tune.
I have one at home. Plus one I can set up on the boat. Boat one consists of a 5m telescopic mast and kite reel with 40m wire. Litrally moor by a field and throw one end in a tree.
Home has a remote tunner on the washing line pole. A 40m wire heading up to the gutters. Then accross to the fence at the back of the garden. I have a large garden with no restrictions. But a 20m one would be easy and pretty much invisible most places. I even seen folks hide them in flats with no garden. (just takes some sneaky creativity. And new EMF rules would mean you need to limit the power. Depending on the location.)
They are not fantastic DX antennas but work great for interG. The inverted L has some dx ability. More so the high the HF band. But verticals are always the better dx antennas for HF. As they have lower take off angles. But are really hard to hide.
Given this is a yaesu group. Better advice on avoiding these reprobates. will be on the other 2 non rig specific groups available under all. As they are hosted on much larger/older instances. And appeal to a wider audiance. They already have many more members.
ATM I have no issue with less yaesu orientated questions here (its currently me and yourself after all). But long term once more yaesu fans find us. Such off topic chats are likly to be less wanted.
Hi!
Thank you for such a detailed and thoughtful reply!
We’re hoping to move to somewhere with a garden soon. If so, and with Mrs TheNumberOfGeese permitting, I’ll be able to join in the HF fun too.
I’m impressed that you’ve managed to get HF working on your boat. I’ll dig my HF Yaesu out of its box and give it a try to see if I can get anything going before we find somewhere to move to. Does mean a trip to ML&S to get the HF bits and bobs, so there goes my pocket money!
Good to know that I’ve just been unlucky in my area with VHF.
You’re right, it’s not a Yaesu-specific message. I’m a professional reddit lurker, but trying my best to help add content as part of the redditsodus(?)… but without practice, I’m not the best at creating on-topic content.
I’ve had a look at “All” and the list just goes on and on (yay!). Do you recommend the following?
Thanks again for your message. Really appreciate it.
yes they seem to be the main ones. All will just continue to grow. Basically any community searched for by any user on feddit.uk will show up. search works well.
if you look at browse.feddit.de that crawls all the instances and tries to list all communities accross the fediverse.
for some reson the local ones here do not show up yet. But hopefully @tom is looking into that. Joining the communities from other instances is supposed to be all it takes. then browse.feddit.de should search 4x a day.
seems the other community we both are members of. that has a few non feddit.uk users is taking time though?
ATM content wise. I just plan to post a few pics of my radios. I have 4 yaesus and one icom.
Getting more users with yaesus will automatically create more subject specifioc content.
Once that happens I may delete this and other non subject related satuff. But will note it a few weeks before doing so. Some content is better then 0 atm. And the fact we have discussed it will make it clear to new members what the plan is long term.