In article
, BMJ
wrote:

I use mine mainly for working satellites.

That sounds great, were no satellites when I was active.

Another thing I want to do is to get a quarter-wave antenna
up for the 160 meter band, to shove a ground wave.

I think that would be a vertical about 132 feet high, I had
better check the local FAA/FCC regulations in these mountains,
to see if that is legal for the helicopters that sometimes
cruise this area.

Probably not legal, so better think in terms of a top-loaded
vertical about 60 feet high, voltage-fed at the ground end.

In the old days I shoved a ground-wave 400 miles, from a
10 foot whip antenna on the rear end of a sailboat, with 10 watts.

A decent antenna should do much better.

Mark

In article , Dave Platt
wrote:

Well, low-power rigs *can* drive an external amplifier... just not all
the way up to legal-limit in one step. A 5-watt Yaesu could drive a
15 dB linear amp up to around 150 watts of RF output

Ahh, that is great, 100 watts of RF will keep me happy.

In the old days I had a neighbor whose porch light went on/off
when I was active. I had to crawl under his house and bond the
joints of his water pipes to get rid of his blinking porch light.

Seems to me the upper power limit in those days was 1,000 watts,
but I probably remember it incorrectly.

Thanks for the latest regulations, my 2010 ARRL handbook
has not arrived in the mail yet, due any day now.

Mark Conrad wrote:
Seems to me the upper power limit in those days was 1,000 watts,
but I probably remember it incorrectly.

I'm not sure when, but it changed from 1500 Watts input to 1,000 Watts output.

1,000 Watts is a lot of power and may not be of much use, depending upon
what you want to do with it. The difference between 100 watts and 1,000 is
not very much when the band is open and not crowded, in a contest it may be
the difference between making contacts and getting lost in the pileup.

You mentioned you were in the hills of California, if you want something
that is (almost) 100% reliable for an emergency a satellite phone might
be better.

In another thread in an another group, I mentioned the ELT (emergency
locator transmitters) that at one time were sold only for airplanes being
available for hikers, etc. The original poster said they are now down to
around $100 each, which makes them a viable option for your car if you
think you may end up in a ditch with no cell phone coverage and out of the
range of any radios.

Welcome back, btw, you can ask for your old call if it has not be taken
by someone else.

73,

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the situation.
i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.

In article , Geoffrey S.
Mendelson wrote:

Seems to me the upper power limit in those days was 1,000 watts,
but I probably remember it incorrectly.

I'm not sure when, but it changed from 1500 Watts input
to 1,000 Watts output.

Ahh, so _that_ is what it is now, 1000 watts RF _output_ ,
okay.



You mentioned you were in the hills of California, if you want
something that is (almost) 100% reliable for an emergency
a satellite phone might be better.

I used to have one about ten years ago, when a bunch of us
motorcycle riders commonly cruised the scenic mountains
here in northern California, again well beyond cell-phone
range. If one of us bikers got in trouble, it was my job
to call in a chopper.


Beware, OT Rant Coming Up
*****************

My 'cycle license is still valid, but now I have enough
sense to avoid motorcycles. g

For 7 years, I worked as a motorcycle messinger in the
Los Angeles area, never had an accident, except for
one time.

An older gentleman edged onto the freeway from an
on-ramp, going about 20 mph, cutting across all lanes
into the fast lane, where I was going the "legal L.A. speed
limit" of about 85 mph, along with all the other idiots.

I _almost_ managed to keep the bike upright, but
not quite - - - dumped the bike at the last minute with
my leg trapped underneath the heavy bike while it was
sliding to a stop.

Last I saw of the old gentleman, he was still chugging away
in the fast lane at 20 mph. g

I was lucky, a trucker behind me swung his rig broadside
to block the fast lane, until the ambulance arrived to scrape
me off the freeway.

Like with a horse, you have to get right back on again. I was
back on the job in a few months, but very careful to avoid
older car drivers.


What really bothers me is that the youngsters today do not
properly train themselves to ride a motorcycle. I traded in
a new heavy Honda "Valkyrie" model, for an even heavier
Honda "Gold Wing" model, the murdercycle that has
a reverse gear, because it is too heavy to back up by
using your feet, if you are on a slight downgrade.

A youngster bought my "Valkyrie" from the dealer I
sold it to.

Youngster promptly killed himself a few weeks later,
when he lost control of the Valkyrie on a turn.

I really think the laws should be changed, to force the
youngsters to take the $50 3-day course from the MSF.
(Motorcycle Safety Foundation)

MSF will not authorize a motorcycle license unless the
youngster demonstrates competence by passing some
rather stiff riding tests.

End of OT Rant -
*********


Welcome back, btw...

Thanks very much, I should have returned to ham radio
long before now, as it is a great endeavor, in my opinion.

My daddy introduced it to me when I was about ten years old,
it lead to a 34 year career in electronics, working in the
research labs of what then was called Hughes Aircraft,
later to be called Hughes Aerospace.

Many interesting projects during my career, such as
working on the old robot series of spacecraft named
"Surveyor", paving the way for manned spaceflight
to the moon.

Back to beating the bushes, the enjoyable task of deciding
which shiny new rig to purchase

Mark

Mark Conrad wrote:
In , Dave Platt
wrote:

Well, low-power rigs *can* drive an external amplifier... just not all
the way up to legal-limit in one step. A 5-watt Yaesu could drive a
15 dB linear amp up to around 150 watts of RF output

Ahh, that is great, 100 watts of RF will keep me happy.

In the old days I had a neighbor whose porch light went on/off
when I was active. I had to crawl under his house and bond the
joints of his water pipes to get rid of his blinking porch light.

Seems to me the upper power limit in those days was 1,000 watts,
but I probably remember it incorrectly.

Thanks for the latest regulations, my 2010 ARRL handbook
has not arrived in the mail yet, due any day now.

You'll notice the K3 is the #1 transceiver in every class (depending on
configuration). While it costs twice what the Yaesu does, it can grow
with you. It is made in USA and is the best radio ever made.

Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
Mark Conrad wrote:
Seems to me the upper power limit in those days was 1,000 watts,
but I probably remember it incorrectly.

I'm not sure when, but it changed from 1500 Watts input to 1,000 Watts output.

When cheap Wattmeters became ubiquitous?

In article ,
Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

Seems to me the upper power limit in those days was 1,000 watts,
but I probably remember it incorrectly.

I'm not sure when, but it changed from 1500 Watts input to 1,000 Watts output.

The current limit on most bands is 1500 watts, Peak Envelope Power
(which is an output-power measurement). It has been quite a while
since the limit was specified in terms of input power to the final
amplifier.

1,000 Watts is a lot of power and may not be of much use, depending upon
what you want to do with it. The difference between 100 watts and 1,000 is
not very much when the band is open and not crowded, in a contest it may be
the difference between making contacts and getting lost in the pileup.

Correct.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

In article , dave
wrote:

You'll notice the K3 is the #1 transceiver in every class (depending on
configuration). While it costs twice what the Yaesu does, it can grow
with you. It is made in USA and is the best radio ever made.

WOW !!! - Thanks, that is one serious rig from elecraft.com

Downloaded their pdf file and drooled over the features and spec's.

Egad, everything seemed so simple, now I have to decide what I
_really_ want in a rig.


You know what this means, I will need to park my carcass in the
parking lot of the nearest Walmart, hold up my cardboard sign
begging for money for Ham Radio gear.

I do free volunteer work for the local hospitals here in N. California,
trying to beat them into submission to adopt faster/better ways of
processing their mountains of paperwork.

Presently, most of them still use chisels and clay tablets
to document their medical procedures.

Only about 10% of USA hospitals take advantage of faster
speech recognition processing of data. (SR for brevity)

As a half-vast user of SR myself, I am used to stomping out
medical data on my Macs and PCs by voice, commonly dictating
complex 600 word medical reports with zero text errors
in four minutes time, wrestling phrases such as:

"perioperative transesophageal echocardiography"


Have to admit though, sometimes my tongue gets wrapped around
my eye-teeth so I can't see what I am saying.


Back on topic -
********

Seems the Elecraft K3/100 HF Transceiver would be ideal for
expediting emergency medical data in case of a national
catastrophe - - - one problem might be that FCC reg's do not
allow encryption of sensitive medical data, if I recall correctly.

I expect in a national emergency that FCC edict would
be quickly waived, allowing common sense to prevail.

Mark

On 2010-03-19, Mark Conrad wrote:

medical data on my Macs and PCs by voice, commonly dictating
complex 600 word medical reports with zero text errors
in four minutes time, wrestling phrases such as:

"perioperative transesophageal echocardiography"

Using what awesome software?

nb

In article , notbob
wrote:

medical data on my Macs and PCs by voice, commonly dictating
complex 600 word medical reports with zero text errors
in four minutes time, wrestling phrases such as:

"perioperative transesophageal echocardiography"

Using what awesome software?

Practically any modern SR software.

It is kinda like ham radio, not so much what you have,
but more important is how you use it.

In this case, I used "MacSpeech Dictate 1.5.8" on a 3-year old
MacBook Pro.

Mac has to be one of the newer Intel-based Macs, software
will not run on older Macs.

One can get the same results using "Dragon NaturallySpeaking"
- - - the "Pro" version 10.1 - - - which I also run on my
old Mac hardware, using the Vista OS from Microsoft.

About the only modern speech software that is difficult to
achieve such accuracy and speed is "Windows Speech Recognition",
(WSR) - which comes free with both Vista and Windows-7 OS.


SR is a very inexact science at the present time, best estimates are
that it will take another 20 years before it is anywhere near as good
as a human, when it comes to converting speech to text.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/a...ml?printable=1


Scroll to near the end of the above website, to this sub-section:

"Building HAL 's Language Knowledge Base"

Read all the way to the end, that will give you a good idea
what our children will be doing with SR 20 years from now.



BTW, Nuance (Dragon) recently bought MacSpeech, so they are
all one company now.


A typical newbie SR user will be lucky to get 70% accuracy.

As he gains experience, that will edge up to about 98%.

In restricted speech like medical, where the same phrases like
"perioperative transesophageal echocardiography" are used
over and over again, the raw accuracy will edge up to 99%.

....or in my case 100%, in 3 out of 4 tries on that 600 word
example - - - the bad "4th" try is invariably my fault,
for mis-pronouncing one of the 600 words.


Too much time way OT, but I gave you a decent answer
to your question.

My post immediately following this will show the entire text
of my medical dictation, with 100% raw accuracy, no correction
required, total dictation time 240 seconds.

Mark