{"id":1371,"date":"2008-11-15T16:38:01","date_gmt":"2008-11-15T20:38:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/?p=1371"},"modified":"2008-11-15T16:38:01","modified_gmt":"2008-11-15T20:38:01","slug":"discount-vx7s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/11\/15\/discount-vx7s\/","title":{"rendered":"Discount VX-7s"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now that Yaesu has their VX-8R ham radio<\/a> due to hit shelves, its predecessor, the VX-7R, is being discounted, and fast. It’s $285 at Universal Radio, and $275 at HRO. I’m a big fan of my tiny little VX-2R (and VX-1R!), but the VX-7R (and the VX-8R that’s replacing it) is a “full-power” HT, putting out 5 Watts. It covers 6, 2, and 440. The VX-7R also does 300 mW on 220 MHz, which isn’t much power at all (0.3 Watts), but it’s better than nothing.<\/p>\n

I’ve had a passing interest in 6 Meter FM for a bit now. There’s the 53.07 MHz machine on Uncanoonuc<\/a>, the big hill in Goffstown that’s home to all sorts of transmitter sites. (Indeed, so many that the noise floor forced them to move their receiver to another site.) 6 Meters can feature some tremendous range, and that’s before skip factors in. (It’s sometimes called the magic band<\/a> because of its status in between HF and VHF.) Further north, there’s now the 53.77 MHz machine on Gunstock<\/a>… And the NE Repeaters site<\/a> lists a whole bunch more. Sadly, the one on Mount Washington appears to be off the air.<\/p>\n

(Besides the fact that I don’t own a 6 meter radio and have no experience setting up repeaters, I have a certain urge to try to set up a 6 meter machine on Mount Washington. It’s problematic, though, because the duplexers<\/a> needed to use the same antenna for simultaneous transmit and receive are enormous<\/em> and not many were ever made… The same problem exists with antennas, so something like a DB420<\/a> folded-dipole array would be entirely unreasonable… They do make some<\/a> verticals, though the linked one is the only monoband 6 meter vertical. (And, as a 2-5\/8-wave vertical for ~53 MHz, it’s 21 feet tall.) The radios are the easy part, as the 42-50 MHz band used to be popular with public safety, back when all the mobile radios put out 100+ Watts and were build really solid. I’ve read of older radios (Mastr-IIs or Micors, for example) being brought into the 6 meter band with superb performance, and ~150 Watts out. I’d be very curious about how a 150 Watt repeater on 6 meters, with an antenna providing 6 dB gain, would perform on the summit of Mount Washington.<\/p>\n

But first things first… I don’t have a radio that does 6 meters. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that Yaesu has their VX-8R ham radio due to hit shelves, its predecessor, the VX-7R, is being discounted, and fast. It’s $285 at Universal Radio, and $275 at HRO. I’m a big fan of my tiny little VX-2R (and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}