Wish me luck

I am not familiar with the bands a General can operate on. ( I know, I could look it up, but since I live in Canada it is not a requirement for me to know what bands you can use in the states)

But if you can operate 40 and 75 meters those are good rag chewing bands. If you want to chase DX go to the higher bands.

I operate a lot of digital and I find the low bands best for rag chewing. Same goes for SSB.

Glad you passed, good luck setting up your HF station!

 

All of them. I guess 40 and 80 would be my first choices but in reality, they are all about the same for general rag chewing.. At least that has been my exoperience.

Lee
NI7I

 

Congratulations!!

Hope to see you on the bands

 

Im a bit late but gratz.

 

Congrats on the new ticket.

I am new to HF, but I have a simple lower dollar station. I already owned a power supply, but there are some decent options. Either a battery and charger (which you may own) or a $100 will get you a good used unit. For an HF radio, a ton of the earlier solid state HF rigs are available for a decent price. I've seen them go exceptionally low at $100 to the typical $250-300. Antenna tuners will allow not ideal antennas to work decent. About $150 will buy a lower powered (100-300W) tuner (and balun in some cases).

Antennas can be built cheap, real cheap. I have one like this: http://www.kr1st.com/hfcoath.htm. It recently came down do to using poor quality rope I had on hand. For the interim I built a folded dipole for 20m out of $6 worth of 300ohm twinlead. It is fed with 33ft of wire which makes it decent on 40m too.

20m is doing well during daylight hours, and seems to be active all the time on PSK. For PSK you'll need to use an old PC with sound card and build a $10 cable.

You don't need a $10,000 station to get on the air and make contacts.

 

Thanks guys for the replies and help! Looks like a friend of mine has a Yeasu FT-7B he might let go and throw in a couple extras. From some of the research Ive done looks like it could be a nice cheaper radio to start on. If everything goes well I could be on the air with may own gear this weekend so keep and ear out.

 

Glad to hear. Keep a listen for my call in the 40m band this summer.