With all these goings-on there MUST be a homebrew page somewhere with folks that have worked in low microwave and understand how easy this stuff is. No?
Not a lot of crossover between the data geeks and RF geeks from what I've seen.
What you do see is photos of completed units where you see a nice SMA setup and a homebrew antenna and you can tell THAT guy or gal "gets it", but is just posting a "here's mine" photo, and not really intending to engage on how they made their antenna.
And most of the data geeks think "an antenna is an antenna" and don't think to ask them why that silly looking piece of copper wire soldered into a connector is what the person used, instead of the cheapie little rubber ducks on everyone else's photos.
Someone recently sent a note in their renewal to the ham club asking if we'd do a senior discount. The BoD internally joked that if we did, the club's revenues would drop by whatever discount we offered. Heh.
Not a WHOLE lot of younger folk playing with RF these days, Jim. And when they do, they're pretty excited they got their $30 Baoufang (sp?) hand held to key an FM repeater. They're used to just poking buttons on the smartphone to communicate. It "just works".
Low microwaves might as well be landing on the moon.
Not meant as an insult to them, they just don't have the background or interest. They think broadcast stuff is "ancient".
'Round here, I'm working on getting the new to me 60' tower up so I can clear off the roof tower on the garage and make that into the rotatable microwave antenna/toy location. If I keep the wind load low enough the Yaesu rotor should survive it.
1.2 GHz will be at the top of the big tower, via a long yagi and 7/8" hardline, but stuff above that in frequency is going to be fed into a dish on the lower rooftop tower where I can get at it and make changes easier, while standing on the roof.
Want to put my 10 GHz station back on the air and then work on getting a real 10 MHz clock source going in the shack so I can lock that silly thing down. (It's fun to chase the frequency all over the place while it's warming up, but totally silly now that it'll be fixed instead of mobile/roving.) Need to also get 2.4 back on the air.
