2m Simplex (146.520 MHz) recordings for 2026-02-13

Well, for any early listeners, due to a death in the family, there's not going to be a Net tonight at 7:30 and 6 NTM. I'll rebroadcast that at 7:30.

Speaker A: Well, it's early, but it's not too early. N6NTM well, folks, due to a death in the family, I'm going to give you all a reprieve on doing the net tonight.
Speaker B: All the yays, raise your hand. All right. Well, that was everybody,
Speaker A: so it's unanimous. That's what I like. But that is the fact of the matter. You all get the night off next week. You can ask anything deeper on the topic. Good evening. In
Speaker C: 6 NTM. Hey, thank you, dad.
Speaker A: Yeah, it's not my family, but it's in my radio family, though. You can ask next week. You might get the lowdown. Have a
Speaker C: good evening.

Likewise. All right, I'm watching a really good movie and it's getting better, so I'm getting Back to it. N6 NTM Thanks.

Kilo niner kilo alpha delta, kilo november six mike, golf kilo in chico. You're about a five six, five six approximately.

Yeah, there generally is neck control. Not hearing him so far this evening. Maybe he'll come on here in a minute, but what's your name and location?

Well, in fact I do know where it is and I think I spoke to you before. Maybe it was last week or the week before maybe. But any event it may have been after the net on that particular day. I don't know. But I know I spoke to you before because you know, man, you don't get a whole lot of radio traffic from there and yeah, you got a great location there. I think I remember telling you about possibly trying the system 36 Carla repeater on 2 meters too because that gets way out there. But maybe you don't like repeaters. I don't know. Anyway, I'm just out here in Chico on the valley floor so about 200ft I guess so that's why you got a good signal. I'll take a standby. Maybe there's someone else who wants to talk to you and you know, give you a report from where they are. This is KN6MGK.

Cool. Nice. Well, yeah, a name here. Steve. Sierra, Tango, Echo, Victor, Echo, and call sign kilo. November 6th, Mike, golf, kilo. Kilo. November 6th, mike, golf, kilo. Back to you.

Well, nothing heard there. I don't know if you're ever up early in the morning, but there's some traffic out here. I think maybe that was when I talked to you. Actually, I'm thinking about it, but some guys usually talking out here, I don't know, six, seven in the morning, eight o' clock in the morning, right in that time frame, you know, they happen to also be on 80 meters on HF, you know, but then they, since they're halfway local, you know, they talk out here from Magalia a lot. There's other traffic out here, sporadically, but it's nothing like it used to be.

Yeah, yeah, the website's carlaradio.net but yeah, frequency is 146115. 146115. The tone is 1 2, 3, positive offset. Anyway, and it's a linked system. So if you use a different tone in the same frequency, then you get part of the link system, you link it all together with over 30 repeaters, plus some all star stuff going on there. But that's most of California and parts of Nevada.

Yeah, most of us, a lot of us know him. That's Ken. He used to live around Fort Jones. And anyway, KNE is the last of his call sign. I forget the first. I'm good on last parts of call signs, but not very good on the first parts. But anyway, he hangs out on the CARLA system for sure. So link side obviously, because he comes in through All Star. But yeah, so in a sense I do All Star because. Because I'm on CARLA a lot and also because there's a repeater over here, the 147105W6GRC. Friends of mine own that and that's all All Star. And they play the Coffee Break net in the mornings between 7:30 and 10. I think that's right. Anyway, so I've got a lot of traffic on that in the mornings, every morning. Actually I do have an All Star node also. And it really isn't above your head if you do that. I mean All Star node you can just buy them already configured. But yeah, it costs money obviously, versus building one. Building one takes some effort. But if you order one already set up, it would come already with your call sign in it. You can operate it with. With a bofang radio if you want to anyway. And the other thing you need is an Internet service, obviously. So that's how it works. Right. So can travel through the Internet to get to its destination. So yeah, you have to have a decent Internet service, whatever it may be, even Starlink.

Yeah, hey, if I was doing it again, I'd buy Clear Nub for sure. But yeah, unfortunately it cost you more money, you know, and you end up, you know, getting the better one. I think there's several different options. But anyway, you've already. When you order, you can give them your information, your call sign, whatever, you know, and they put it in. Then I'll say. Then I'll agree with you. Yeah, that's pretty much plug and play. Yeah, there's kind of like learning computer program or something in a sense of like the dashboard. If you wanted to do, to change what, you know, what node that you're hooked to and things like this and look at the bubble chart and stuff like that. In that case, yeah, you use your, like a dashboard on a. On like a laptop or desktop to view that so that you can change. So you can direct it to different places like rooms or node numbers, essentially. Like the Carla system, the Las Vegas system, anywhere around the world you can plug it into that has. Carla. Sorry, that has All Star. And you can be talking on their repeater systems. So yeah, there is a little bit of a learning curve there. But it's not like you have to learn the Linux terminal and, and all the different codes and commands and things like that. No, that would be expert class. So maybe it's a little bit above novice, but I don't think it's too terrible. The worst it gets is figuring out your Internet stuff. Sometimes they don't like to communicate well if you don't maybe open up the ports or something like that, have port forwarding, if you've heard of that, on your Internet router. So that's where some difficulty might come in. But that depends. Some people can handle that because they're good at networking back to you.

Okay. Yeah. KN6MGK. Well, now, you touched on a subject about. You said you get more traffic than you do on hf. Well, I don't know. I can get lots of traffic on hf. So it just depends on where you're at, what time of day and what kind of antenna you have. So we could talk about that a little bit if you want to.

Well, I also enjoy portable ops too. So I go out portable quite a bit. Although I've been taking a little bit of a break from that here recently. I've worked with several different kinds of antennas and I do have a Palomar off center fed right now, although I've cut it down, you know, experimenting with it. Nevertheless, they can be a bit noisier. It's pretty hard to beat a regular just center fed dipole. By the way, a lot of things are or what they call a fan dipole, which is same thing, center fed, but you can hook other wires to it at different lengths to pull in different bands. Right. So that would be nice. But yeah, no, 7300 is a great radio to start with and to utilize and all the filtering and stuff will make it quieter. I'd be curious on your comment because I have a two friends that have those. If you're using any radials, if you're not using radials, then that's what's compromising it. Now I know you can that one. You can, you know, you can use it without radials, but they work better with radials and they do sell a radial kit or you can probably build your own too.

Well, yes they can. Yep. But I've always gotten a couple of years out of mine pretty easily. And if you look for something the last, you know, 10 years out in California with all the heat and cold and everything else going on, then you know, you have to be real, you know, you have to think about using maybe just like a cold. They call it a cold drawn, you know, copper wire that's not stranded. You know, those have a lot more strength to them but you know that's getting up. A lot of times I'm using stuff that I just find I make my own. It's not a dipole is pretty easy actually. So you can buy the little center connectors even from hand radio outlet that are like a one to one balance that have the two posts on it where you just put your wire on it and you just cut your own wire. So anyway. But yeah, so you probably want to use like say 14 gauge or something like that, you know, wire so it's a little stronger even stranded insulated would work like that thnn wire for houses, you know. Or how about marine, marine grade wire if you have to order some or whatever. But that would get strong, be strong stuff. And also, you know, maybe UV protectant but give you some ideas there. What you do is you don't try to pull it super tight. You snug it up maybe, but a little droop is okay. You know, that way there. If you have it in between trees and they move back and forth well then it just moves up and down a little bit and stuff. Now some people get tricky. I'll be putting my pulleys on them and counterweights on the ends and things like that. But one of the main things of a dipole I think if you're worried about strength a bit is like right now, right now I have mine just two points pulled together so it does droop in the center. But it's to put a third point, one that holds the center up or in the case of your off center fed, the short section, you know where that balance is right there on off center fed. That's probably a 4 to 1 balance. So you want to support that with, with something too. So typically I think palomars are 1/3 2/3. So. So you know, you might put the long section kind of figure that that's your radiating section and the short section is a reflecting section. So depending on you set it up a dipole east, west or north south is how you get your, your propagation. So now vertical is one by which you know it's better for a low takeoff angle or. You said the word dx. Well, so if you go on early, like say 6 in the morning, maybe even a little earlier. I mean, the Asian countries are out there big time on 40 meters. I've been getting them just about every morning, you know, about six in the morning, about 40 meters. And you'd get them, I would think, on that antenna. Back to you.

Well if it's a dipole, I would say yes because like if mine, mine is east west and I have the longer section more to the west and the shorter section to the east. Now I'm going to switch mine around. I do this because I want to change my, my contacts some. I'm trying to get more DX countries. I'm at 85 countries right now. I'd like to get to 100 by the end of the year. It gets more difficult as you get higher. I got friends that got 200 countries. Well anyway, I'm not looking to do that baby steps here. But anyway, so being that it's that way, it's east west, my takeoff angles have higher gain north south because the propagation of a dipole, I don't care if it's off center fed or whatever his broadside to its, to its position like that. So kind of figure it like it's a donut going down the whole length of it, right. So your gain is going to come off of, off of that in the north south way. And mine's not perfect or any such. But I know I get South America countries way easier than I get stuff like over and say China, China is a little tougher. Although I've gotten it, you know, with other digital modes. I do FT8 and I get that one and I also get Asiatic Russia on that same antenna on 40 meters but you know, it's FT8. So also can do some CW too and get these Asian countries but you know, that's what can pierce through the noise and so forth. But I am kind of curious, should ask you if you have solar or anything nearby that you think might be causing that noise. And since you're talking about noise on hf, what is your noise level? So what is your. If you're not keyed up, you're just listening on a frequency on say 20 meters. Where does the meter hang out, hang out say around four or five or you know, or where does it hang out in that area? Or is it way up there? 7 8, you know, because obviously that if your noise level is 7 8, then you can't hear anybody below that back to you.

Well, I'm sitting here looking at two HF rigs and I've got a couple of computers here, Raspberry PI. It's pretty common, you know, pretty common for that. I wonder what you use them for. A power supply. Like I'm running off of a 12 volt battery right now and I do have a little off grid, couple hundred watts feeding, feeding it, you know, on a solar. So but anyway, anytime you can run off of direct current, you know, 12 volts or thereabouts, you know, 13.8 I guess is good. That's kind of tangent to what you're talking about, what I've seen. Cause the most RF issues in HF at least are those wall warts. Any wall warts, you've got LED lighting. So wall warts being like, you know, if you're, I don't know, trying to think of like if you have a laptop computer and you're plugged in, maybe that could be an issue. You know, mine runs off of dc, you know what usb, C pd. A lot of the new laptops are running off of that anyway. Again, I have a power strip that my 12 volt battery feeds and so I can hook up many devices to that that are all run off of like my USB C PD for instance, that operates my laptop, whatever. But one thing you can do on computers and cables and things is put little ferrite beads on them if you're having any issues with RF getting into the computer. And that does happen because when you start going 100 watts on HF, you know, it can cause my mouth to wig out on me and stuff like that. So got to put the ferrite beads on my mouse. Of course some people are using fancy Bluetooth these days and that makes a difference. So anyway. But solar can definitely cause RF issues. And it doesn't have to be just the panels. A lot of times it'd be the little inverters, microinverters or any charge controllers, anything like that that might be nearby that could cause RF issues. And the way you know is if you're having, maybe you have a way of disconnecting it all. And so you can see if you're getting a whole bunch of noise and you go out and disconnect it all, then the noise goes away. Then that's obviously where it is. At a friend's house, we went through a circuit. He has solar. And it didn't end up being his soil pills, it ended up being he had a fan inside of his garage. So we were just, we went through his whole circuit panel. And we turned off one circuit one at a time until we isolated which circuit was causing the problem. Then we looked at what was on that circuit. It ended up being a fan inside of his garage. So he disconnected that fan and that was the end of it until replace it with a better grade fan. You know, stuff like that. So anyway, it can be a lot of things that cause a lot of noise. KN6MGK.

Well, I for one hope that they are listening and you know, more traffic is good and we're leaving plenty of break for them to get in if they want to. So anyway, nothing wrong with that. The other thing that's good and I gotta say that I'm not the best at this, but there's a nice ground. Put a nice ground in your shack system and if you have properly grounded system there, it helps with noise too. But yeah, the vertical verticals could be a lot noisier than a dipole. Also, if you have plenty of space, think about some sort of a loop antenna. Doesn't have to be perfect, you know, four poles up somewhere or four trees somewhere and you run wires around maybe a four to one balance somewhere and come down to your shack with a feed line. You know, if you can get it up 30ft or something like that, that'd be great. 40 would be better, you know. But yeah, if you can get like a. Oh, I think it's about a 240 foot piece of wire in a loop situation, you know, you can probably get, you know, 80, 40, 20, 15, 10, 6, all on the same wire. So it's pretty fun. And they're a lot quieter. So anyway, just a thought out there for you. You can investigate a full wave loop antenna, lots of configurations for them, delta loops, so on. But anyway, HF is fun and yes, it's all going to take a little bit of time learning. So I'm still learning too, a little bit every day. I think it's kilo. 9 kad kilo nov 6 might golf kilo. I'll say 7.3.

Friday. Just about every day and 6:10pm.

Speaker A: This is what those guys used to sound like when I first started listening and it was every morning. They at least had at least a 20 minute skimp on running the Democrat politicians in the ground.
Speaker B: And six NTM. They do come
Speaker A: up with some good ones, you must admit. And nobody got insulted over it. What secretary just did because it came from Steve. He doesn't like being associated with being a Democrat even though the state he lives in is nothing but Democrats.

You must have took off by now. Wipe ntm.

I just. They. They. They really screwed with the email of Outlook. So anyway, I was just now reading your parts list and. And procedure for that. That seems pretty excessive. You must had fun with that.

Speaker A: And Cat 6. Or is it 7? That's not popular. Twisted and shielded? Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker B: sometime I'm running pretty far behind. I was hoping to grab a shower,
Speaker A: but I guess that don't matter. Dick. I'd have been
Speaker B: done with it after today. Except for now. He wants to put dimmer switches on all those LED lights. Nine of them.

Yeah. All nine of these. He's got three just like the ones I got in the shop. And then he's got the next size, smaller. And they all have the second pigtail coming out of the transformer box. The three wires, real small, like 14 or 16 gauge. Yes.

He. He doesn't think that he needs to run them full blast unless he's out there working on something. So he just wants to be able to dim them back. I. I don't care. But, you know, heck, that's nine more wires, and the. And the top three are, like, 22ft in the air. The ones that. The six that run down both sides of the shop, three on each side, just like three on the ceiling, are closer to the ground, maybe 14ft or 12ft, something like that. But, yeah, I wish he would have came up with this idea when I was wiring all the lights to start with, because it would have been easy to run that second wire. So I'm wondering what the. What's the potentiometer side of the. It's not just a potentiometer. It has to be done inside the light. That's why they add that piglet tail, because, you know, an LED has a gate voltage when it's on, and then anything less than that, it's off.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, I'll talk to him this morning about that. He said he was gonna go get everything. I don't think it'd be that easy. I did mount the ream remastat the one I got from you on the top of the air box. And I wired it both ways just so I could see if there was a speed increase, you know, to the. The black side wire or the white side wire.
Speaker B: No difference. They prefer to be on the black wire. Check. No big deal. I didn't solder or do anything to it. I just twisted it together.
Speaker A: Our next breakfast will discuss the. The amcrest end of it. I don't think we need an amcrest whatsoever if the phenology is
Speaker B: going to work. Oh, yeah. You did
Speaker A: a good layout there. I don't know what Radio one and Radio two. Why that's necessary. If I just put my camera right out at the road, I should be able to look at the whole front of his house.

I see. What's the cost of that? Oh, that's reasonable, all right. Well, we'll save it for breakfast. We'll draw it as we go.

Yeah, it looks like I don't have to replace the lenses to switch topic. God. It's not really lenses, but the protective covering on my Android phone or. Or let me see, what are they calling that? The S22 shoot? Brain farting on that. But I'm due for an upgrade and Lori already went to Apple and I sure like the pictures on the Apple phone. So rather than even fix that when I got. We're just gonna do the upgrade. Her mom got an Apple phone and of course they're all on my plan now, so they didn't use the upgrade, the free upgrade. They offered that to me two years ago and again this year. So the way around fixing that little lens cover thing, I can just get a new Apple phone and hopefully it doesn't take me a year to remember how to use it. I already got a Apple watch and phone about seven, eight, nine years ago and I had trouble even turning the damn thing on, so I sent all that stuff back. I hope I don't work myself into a conundrum over Apple stuff, but hey, I got two of their tablets. I can operate those. They can't be much different.

Oh, good. Well, Lori uses hers regularly, so I got. I got close by. Inspiration. Yeah. All right, well, I know you must be getting close, so I better jump out of here, let you get on the road.

All right. Well, I figured you'd be taking off here pretty quick for breakfast. All right, very good. We got a bunch of stuff. Talk about maybe two breakfasts worth. But I always look forward to that time anyway. N6 and TM.