My Rig
I am a radioamateur licenced in 1996 and my callsign is YO8SSW. I can usually be found on 20 meter band ( 14 Mhz ) in the CW section.
Back in my radioamateurism youth I traded my ZX Spectrum compatible HC91+ computer on a homebrewed sincrodine transceiver having somewhere around 4W output. Using a lambda / 2 dipole antenna for 40 meters I was working pretty much all Europe and some Asian Russia stations when propagation was good.
Few years later I moved with my parents into another city so I kind of gave up being a ham.
Two months ago I felt it's time to get back on the band so I purchased a used Yaesu FT-100D transceiver which is a very small HF/VHF/UHF all mode mobile rig.
The FT-100D comes in two flavours : regular and D version. The D stands for DSP and it basically includes a chip for DSP operations that could be purchased as an option for the older version. Mine is the older version with the optional DSP installed. Nevertheless, it acts just great. I'm happy with it.
While buying the transceiver I was aware of the fact that since I live in a rented flat I don't have too many options to install an efficient antenna so I also purchased a MFJ-945D antenna tuner which you can see in the picture ( to be honest, the picture presents an "E" model whilst mine is "D" type ).
An antenna tuner is basically used to match the impedance of the transmitter to the impedance of the antenna. This allows you to use almost anything radiant as an antenna and tune it so that you can use still get on air and not damage your finals.
Back in my radioamateurism youth I traded my ZX Spectrum compatible HC91+ computer on a homebrewed sincrodine transceiver having somewhere around 4W output. Using a lambda / 2 dipole antenna for 40 meters I was working pretty much all Europe and some Asian Russia stations when propagation was good.
Few years later I moved with my parents into another city so I kind of gave up being a ham.
Two months ago I felt it's time to get back on the band so I purchased a used Yaesu FT-100D transceiver which is a very small HF/VHF/UHF all mode mobile rig.
The FT-100D comes in two flavours : regular and D version. The D stands for DSP and it basically includes a chip for DSP operations that could be purchased as an option for the older version. Mine is the older version with the optional DSP installed. Nevertheless, it acts just great. I'm happy with it.
While buying the transceiver I was aware of the fact that since I live in a rented flat I don't have too many options to install an efficient antenna so I also purchased a MFJ-945D antenna tuner which you can see in the picture ( to be honest, the picture presents an "E" model whilst mine is "D" type ). An antenna tuner is basically used to match the impedance of the transmitter to the impedance of the antenna. This allows you to use almost anything radiant as an antenna and tune it so that you can use still get on air and not damage your finals.