No one expects THE SPANISH INQUISITION! Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor of Spain (1483–1498). Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise... surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise... and ruthless efficiency.... Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the trope.... Our four...no... amongst our weapons.... amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... Cardinal, read the charges. You are hereby charged that you did, on diverse dates, commit electromagnetic heresy against the photons of 2 meters. A full confession shall be extracted! The Spanish Inquisition torture chamber. Mémoires Historiques (1716) The Spanish Inquisition, Auto-da-fé, Plaza Mayor in Madrid, 1683
KQ6XA ... in the spirit of LARRY THE CABLE GUY ... I don't care who you are ... now that's funny ! Thank you.
RG6 cable combined with those adapters will put too much leverage and angular force stress on the HT connector, for this sort of air sport application. The HT's connector is likely to break. Then the connector breaks off, the cable might go flying back into the propeller
Paramotoring can be a rough sport. Avoid obstacles. A good landing is one you can walk away from. Winding it up...
I always recommend that people use a short jumper using small coax to get away from having stress on those small SMA connectors. Another product that looks good to use for antenna mounting are those F type grounding blocks used on cable TV and satellite installs. A person could screw that to a metal cross member, or attach with hose clamps or U bolts, if he didn't want to drill. The cable attaches on one side, and the antenna attaches on the other. The antenna could go upward or downward, depending on where it was located. The screw normally used to attach the ground wire could be used as an additional ground plane element, if desired. These blocks are very inexpensive.
Did I read and interpret this correctly Bonnie? If so, you left out the hunters, off road operators, garage sales pickers, bank robbers, Santa Claus spotters and unicorn chasers. When your done giving it all away let us know which ones are for license operators. KQ6AX posted ........... Coordination of frequency and PL tone is the first step to a communications standard. Here are some suggestions for hams who are PG/PPG/Para pilots using 2 meter FM: Frequency: Program these 4 widely-recognized 2m simplex frequencies into the channel memory of all your radios. Use one of them as a calling frequency, or starting point. "The Para Primary Channel", suggestion: 147.510 MHz. Channel Frequency Programming: Channel 1 / 147.510 MHz, PL=100 Hz, FM (Para Primary) Channel 2 / 146.535 MHz, PL=100 Hz, FM, Channel 3 / 146.550 MHz, PL=100 Hz, FM Channel 4 / 146.595 MHz, PL=100 Hz, FM PL Tone: Program 100 Hz Tone Squelch (aka CTCSS or PL) in every radio on every one of the above channels. PL=100 Hz is easy to remember. This CTCSS / PL tone (Continuous Tone-Coded Squelch System) will keep you from picking up interference, intermod garbage, and stray conversations that aren't intended for your fellow ham pilots and ham ground crew. This HT feature transmits a 100 Hz sub-audible tone. Then, the HT receiver only opens its squelch when it hears the 100 Hz sub-audible tone. Mode: Program your radios for FM rather than NFM. It is louder and clearer for long distance. Contingency plan: If you have a problem on channel 1, simply get your fellow ham pilots switch to channel 2, and so on... make an agreement that if you lose each other, you will return to channel 1 and start over. Radio Check: Always radio check all your radios on all the frequencies before relying on them. Don't just check them at a close distance. Check them from about a quarter mile away. If you can't talk a quarter mile on the ground, then you should find out what is wrong before relying on them in flight. WA6VVC I get it, that it is a suggestion. Most of us have work hard to enjoy what we have. I not am willing to go with this suggestion to stimulate the hobby. If it fly's use the air band. If business use the business band. If family fun use the FRS / GMRS / MURS. FCC already as made the allocations. WA6VVC
The second line makes it clear she is not condoning unlicensed use: Here are some suggestions for hams who are PG/PPG/Para pilots using 2 meter FM:
Ah ... which radio, which band. The air bands are appropriate for PPG pilot training, brief flight coordination/announcing location, and some airports we fly from require us to have them to announce intentions and monitor local traffic. Some of us have them for those airports but they are not appropriate for the chit-chat we'd like to do, the AM they use is very susceptible to ignition noise and is more difficult to understand, and there are no frequencies specifically set aside for us to legally use. In addition, getting those to communicate to our (usually Bluetooth with noise cancelling) headsets is challenging (I know of only one aviation handheld with Bluetooth built in) and the radios are fairly expensive (I guess Baofeng & co haven't discovered that market yet). I've been chewing this over a long time and I keep coming back to the GMRS license being the easiest to make become a defacto standard in the community. Additionally, the 400 MHz band means the shortest antennas (if we can get the signals around the bodies). (And yes, I even contemplated CB radios. Except for the antenna length and the AM thing, probably also an option.) But during a long drive for work today I was also chewing on the antenna problem. Reviewing the links that Jim provided I realized (again) just how different these aircraft are from any other - even others in the ultralight family. Mounting anything on the frame is going to create risk and interference with lines/controls issues, ground plane problems, add bulk, as well as not being ideal for getting the signal around the human. So I returned to my original concept of a wire going up one of the lines of the wing. This seem like a great way to be able to keep the antenna light and safely away from interfering with controls, - and has the added advantage of being usable for PG pilots as well. If it just weren't for that pesky ground plane problem. I really want the antenna to go up one of the lines - light, clean, out of the way, cheap. But getting around the common mode issue was not easy. One of Jims' links described a way to decouple the antenna elements from the feed line and I fiddled around with that for a while This stumped me for about 45 minutes until it hit me ... The coax from the radio needs to be terminated in a small balun. The output side of the balun is connected to the short piece of coax running up the wing line. This will (should?) eliminate the common mode currents below the balun, and still allow the upper half of the antenna to be core with the shielding removed, and the other half below it, just normal coax, using the shielding as the counterpoise (or half of the element). The balun shouldn't need to be very large - 5W or less - and would ideally be attached to one of the paraglider lines at a point above the pilots head, then the rest of the "coaxtenna" extend above that. If very thin coax is used I would think that the added wind resistance would not pull on the line enough to cause an issue but that needs to be tested. The radio end of the cable could be configured as needed; the entire antenna could probably be attached - sewn - to the line and further down the riser with needle and thread, a breakaway connector added for safety, and from there a short length to wherever the radio is mounted. Had a long day, hitting the hay, lots more to think about but a bunch has been accomplished. Let me just say thank you to all of you for the help so far.
That's probably not going to work. In order for the feedline itself to decouple, you would need to provide a very high impedance choke or trap around a QW down from the end of the shield, where the center conductor is cut back from the shield. IOW, around 38" from the end of the antenna. This would create an RF insulator at that point. But creating this is not easy or small. It can be done with a carefully chosen number of turns in the coax, depending on diameter of coax, and diameter of the resulting coil. But to have a decent Q, it will need to be a fairly large diameter, maybe an inch or larger. What you are talking about is similar to the "2M Flower Pot Antenna" in the following link. The biggest problem you will have is creating that choke/trap in a small volume, it certainly won't be something you can "sew in", since it has to be at a certain point, and it needs to be a certain size. A simple sleeve made out of small copper tubing or coax shield would occupy less volume, and run linear with the coax. You can't just place a balun somewhere on the line and expect it to work right. http://vk2zoi.com/articles/half-wave-flower-pot/
Im glad the sport is growing. Yet I agree that they need to get the license as well. They could have a blast on hf with the right antenna!
My guess is that Baofeng and other Chinese manufactured radios (both type-accepted or not) are the cheapest solution. 73 - Scott - WQ8M
