u/thesoulless78

Just kind of curious what your situation was and what you did to work around it. I'm currently trying to figure out what I want to do for a permanent install at my house instead of just putting up my portable station in the back yard and running into a lot of irritations.

Basically my office where I want radios is on the second floor on the east side of the house. All my service entrance and ground rod is at the ground on the west side behind the garage.

And all the good trees for antennas are also on that side, the east side is exposed to the street with minimal cover so even if I just go through the wall there the HOA people might see it on that side. Plus no good way to bond a ground rod on that side since there's a driveway on one side and a patio on the other.

And naturally I have crank out windows so passthroughs aren't really an option there either.

So my options seem to be, put stuff in the attic which is probably not the best plan (especially considering it's all blown insulation and not tall enough to stand in), or at least run coax across the attic and down into the garage to the service entrance which isn't horribly long at least for HF frequencies but long enough that if I want anything other than a perfectly resonant antenna I need a remote tuner.

Or drill holes and run coax along the outside of the house like the TV guys do, but LMR400 is gonna look way worse than tiny CATV cable. Might be able to hide it under the siding at least?

So yeah, looking for advice or just commiseration. Curious if you had a really annoying situation and what you did.

Not necessarily struggling to find a good tone but I'm finding a lot of good ones and being indecisive. Doesn't help that there's like... 2 actual Voxes, the Catalyst Vox, the Matchless, etc.

Was messing around this morning and the Mandarin 80 and Interstate Zed are also sounding pretty good.

Tried the Litigator and Divided Duo in the past and I can get pretty good cleans but with my specific guitars they seem to get a little flubby/fuzzy on the neck pickup if there's any amount of dirt in the signal.

So all that to say, what should I check out?

I.e. something like this (pdf warning): https://www.wa5vjb.com/references/Discover\_Ham\_satellites\_with\_a\_cheap\_Yagi\_2006%20WA5VJB.pdf or this: https://www.qsl.net/dk7zb/Duoband/4+5\_2m-70cm.htm

If I build these without a diplexer but just separate feed points for each band (because I want to monitor the downlink but I don't own a full duplex radio) do I run the risk of cooking my receive radio from too much power coupling in from the transmit radio? (I guess it probably would have to be the WA5VJB version since the DK7ZB only has one feed point to start with).

I realize I may desense the receive one I realize and not have any better luck than just running a singular radio but worth a try.

I also realize there's probably a way to calculate this but I don't know the math so I'm just being extra paranoid.

I don't want to do a cross element like the Arrow because I lack the mechanical engineering to make something easily disassembled and I don't want to store or transport a permanent crossed-element antenna.

Considering giving Void a shot but I know Plasma seems to be more and more reliant on systemd these days. (Which I'm not a hater but I'm curious about Void for other reasons). Any glaring glitches or does it work pretty well?

In between the picture transmissions. Almost sounds like an APRS beacon but I wouldn't expect APRS on 70cm. Anyone know what it might be?

SignalStick on both, squelch open on both, both tuned to the correct frequency. Got one image basically full quieting on the QRZ-1 and just static on the Yaesu. Which I know it's a cheap direct conversion radio and the main reason I got it was for the IP54 rating, I'm just still surprised because I'd expect it to be on par at least.

There was one time where I bumped the PTT on it for a split second with no antenna connected but everything seems to work "normally" on it otherwise. I guess maybe that could've damaged it but it seems unlikely that it would affect that but I can still talk on my local repeater normally.

I'll experiment more on the next pass I guess...

FWIW I suspect it's just desensing because I'm seeing S9+ on the meter on the Yaesu when there's nothing transmitting. But again, just surprised it's worse than the cheaper radio.

Maybe I need one of those Wouxun superhet radios...

I guess really my question is, is this plausible or does it seem like maybe something is wrong with my Yaesu?

I haven't noticed much practical difference even for weaker stuff like ISS SSTV so I'm curious how close they are. And obviously the rubber duck is a lot more convenient to carry.

I have that but I have a lightweight CF mast that works great for one end of a wire antenna but not as good for anything heavy and definitely not as good for anything vertical since it's conductive.

Anything that's solid enough to hold that up without completely breaking the bank? Probably only need around 20' for that but not opposed to it being longer so I can use it for HF antennas where the feedpoint has to be elevated too.

Just not something I'll use super often so I don't want to spend a huge fortune. I know crappie poles exist but not sure they can manage the weight of a whole antenna+feedline too.

No like showstopper issues but I'm a little salty about a 1.1GB batch of updates like a week after release. Just seems like it's a lot of downloading and rebooting for what isn't even a rolling release.

I think I'm leaning towards either going back to Debian, or just going full rolling and doing Arch (or maybe Endeavour if I'm feeling lazy on the install). At least Arch in my experience is usually fewer updates than Fedora just since there's typically less stuff installed.

Anything else I should check out?