It's been awhile, sorry...
So now that I have passed my ham radio license, I have spent time on the 2m band chatting with a number of contacts in the local area. I have started to use APRS with a cable and my Baofeng UV-5R with some success (receive, no transmit on APRS - boo!). And then when the radios where on sale, I bought a Yaesu FT-710.
The FT-710 is a monster, and while every ham says this, I can't imagine purchasing another 160m - 6m radio. With that purchased, it sat in the box for a month and then I finally unpacked it. I powered it on, made sure the mic wasn't connected and proceeded to play with the menus. Later I connected a compromised antenna and just listened to whatever came in - the only thing I could hear was the time signal on 15 mhz. Clearly, an antenna was needed!
Being that a radio like that will make you cash poor in seconds, I was biding my time. With a small budget, I thought what if I ordered some RG-58 cable, some banana clips, and 30 metres of 16 awg speaker wire to at least see if I could listen to the 10m, 12m, 15m, or 17m bands with an appropriate cut length of cable.
My plan is straightforward:
- Cut the wire for a 1/2 wave dipole
- Connect the wire to the banana clip and then place the wire along the top of 2m tall fence (yes I know that will compromise the reception)
- Turn the power on the radio down as low it can go and hope that I don't damage anything
While I wish that I had an SWR meter, I don't so what I'll have to do is be fairly conservative on the power and bit more accurate on the cutting as apparently I could fry the FT-710 if the SWR is too high...
Update: The weekend has passed and I tried do two different antennas; one was a fence mounted horizontal dipole and the other was an inverted "V" dipole and both were cut to the 10m band. While I could hear conversations with the horizontal dipole, the inverted "V" seemed to have better reception and I even made a contact! Thanks to N6HU for the contact and putting up with inexperience when responding to a POTA CQ.