Post #4259840

Advice I wish I didn’t get with my General #hamradio ticket: Random wire antenna This should not be your first HF antenna. To use it you need an antenna tuner, and many starter SDR rigs have an ATU built in. In myself and others around me, the ATU gives a low SWR and the appearance of perfect operation, but you have no intuition for how much of your transmit power comes out as RF energy vs. heat At that point there are a thousand points of failure you don’t know to check, so the first time you call CW to the void you have no idea if yuure holding the mic wrong, your rig is misconfigured, or if the band is closed Work to minimize unknowns by making as many parts of your kit known quantities. This is why I wish someone told me to just get a pretuned 40m EFHW out of the gate