WB6BYU; It is seldom that I see someone who has such a good grasp of the fundamentals. Excellent write-up.

I guess I would only add the other things that go into putting out a clean signal without an amplifier. Proper settings of microphone gain, compression, having a beefy, stable power supply for your transceiver, if doing phone decent microphone habits, etc... Having someone who is going to give you an accurate assessment of how you sound over the air (not the 9's rule, a friend who will tell you that you sound like Peewee Herman or Bob Dylan or something else unusual).

From an engineering perspective the bolt threads riding in the channel of the plate will have a tendency to chew things up a bit. If the slots were a slight bit bigger they could go with stainless steel bushings over the bolts so that during the raising/lowering operation the bushing is rolling along in the slot. This would reduce any chance of binding or galling of the bolts or plate.

Then again, how often are you raising or lowering the antenna?

We should be careful. He seems to know that he is OK with phone from 28.3 to 28.5 MHz (200 W P.E.P.) (Tech authorization). There is no allocation for tech licenses on 20 m and there is a narrow CW allocation on 40 m at 7.025-7.125 MHz. If we send him off onto other bands it can cause him problems.

Techs get a taste of HF, hopefully this will encourage him to upgrade to General if he has a positive experience and sees the value of gaining those other bands. I hope he does.

A simple 11 m whip can always be trimmed down to 10 m (another good learning experience). I hope he can find a local elmer to help him out.

In my first house it was about an 1 1/2" copper pipe that went alongside a roof joist on the way down and was strapped. It was pretty robust. In the house I own now it is a piece of PVC that I would not trust to keep itself on the roof.

Mounting something close to the opening of the vent pipe can be problematic. For my home that is on a septic system that is also the vent for the tank (on the roof) and hydrogen sulfide gas can be present that will quickly corrode up metals.

Maybe if I was looking for a place to mount a short 2m/70cm antenna without a mast it would be ok. I would not go putting up a mast on that pipe and expect it to not flex and potentially loosen up from the roof and create a spot for rain to leak in.

Yea, that might get in the way of being heard. Unless you are into 1920's spark-gap transmissions.

I guess this needs to be restated and reinforced. "An LED does not emit any form of RFI". If you ran your house off of DC power you would have absolutely zero EMI/RFI from lighting.

Any problems you are having are caused by lousy designs in the power conversion circuitry to bring 120 VAC down to DC voltage levels or in some pulse modulation schemes to do things other than running an LED off of a pure DC voltage.

If you bought a box of LED's and current limiting resistors and wanted to string them together as LED lighting you would have one of the electrically quietest forms of illumination possible other than a heated filament bulb but many times more efficient.

Companies that design in el-cheapo power supplies and conversion schemes should "be beaten with sticks".

I wired my house when it was being built with a secondary DC power system with 12 volt, 2 amp circuits at a bunch of auxiliary outlet plates where I also can connect into shielded audio cable, Ethernet or multimode fiber (only used in two places right now but the capability is always there for more fiber, just add connectors to the existing glass). The DC lighting also has the advantage of being connected through breakers to a big set of batteries so during a power outage the only thing I notice is the beeping of UPS'es for things that still require mains power.

It sounds like with your experience in the power industry that you too have had some exposure to mesh. I am a consulting engineer in the same industry (utilities and power) and have worked with mesh systems in those applications. While it all sounds great in theory (high speeds, etc...) the reality is that mesh networks are "non-deterministic" and you can end up with fairly large latencies (seconds to minutes) on networks that are error prone or with constantly shifting network paths across the mesh. Ethernet may work as a physical interface but when you put in 50-100 nodes and mix manufacturers then everything has to fall back to the lowest common denominator.

I am not speaking theoretical (either as ideal or as F.U.D.) but from years of actual experience with mesh networks and data protocols like DNP-3 or MODBUS where out-of-order data just messes things up something terrible.

A well running mesh takes forethought and planning. Not just a bunch of ad-hoc nodes thrown up at the spur of the moment. I deal with them all the time for smart-grid (AMI) systems and even the most current designs can take quite a bit of time for the mesh to form and stabilize (902-928 MHz direct sequence systems or electric and water meters with take-out-points) (one company suggests that we allow the system to stabilize for a day so we could get four successful data packets from each node).

I like packet from the standpoint that it can be fairly straightforward to implement with a soundcard type interface. Textual data is not ambiguous like the wanderings of someone on a microphone. You can use forms and standard reporting formats. It can be fast (milliseconds), verified delivery and benefits from security through obscurity. While not encrypted it is less likely to be monitored by the scanner crowd unless they are willing to use their own soundcard app to demodulate the digital data. Even terminal to terminal FSK at 1200 baud is a great way to send data and can be set up really fast.

It definitely will not hurt you to take all of the FEMA emcomm courses the most important one you can take is not in the course catalog. It will be the somewhat informal course that may take an evening or two of actually meeting with the EMA agency to integrate into their operations.

If you get a chance, drill with them too. Even if your role is minimal in their drill they will get used to seeing your face and you are more likely to find them willing to create a slot for you in their planning if they know you will show up and be flexible in assignments and duties.

Hmm, transformer, bridge rectifier, filter caps... you can pretty much choose your own form of voltage regulation.

I try to not get too attached to replicating any specific manufacturers way of voltage regulation if they use weird circuits or unobtanium parts.

You could give the supply a variable output or current limiting protection with a few extra components.

It may be clearer to think of it as "deviation" from the center frequency carrier and the frequency of the deviation is the frequency of the intelligence. Like FSK tones on FM, that makes things intuitively obvious.

That is oversimplified of course as with an FM signal like from a commercial broadcast in the 88-108 MHz band you have sub-carriers (FM pilot, R+L, R-L, sub-carriers like SCA broadcast) that may run 100 KHz away from the center frequency. It all was so theoretical in school and only really made sense when I had plenty of time to look at what was going on with a spectrum analyzer.

I see the foil backed products everywhere in home building. Foil backed foam board that is used for insulation or house wrap, Foil backed sheetrock, foil backed vapor barrier cloth and just foil.

None of it is intended to be "to block RF". It has thermal insulating value if it captures dead space air and as a supplemental vapor barrier like Tyvekk. Also it is used as a radiant reflector of heat.

In my house I did install it in the walls, floors, attic and joist areas as an RF shield (more effective than tin-foil hats for alien mind control rays). Even my windows are covered with metallic window film (just a higher grade of window tint). On the inside walls between rooms there is fiberglass insulation and foil/tyvek house wrap. It makes the house quiet from an RFI/EMI standpoint but also quiet from a "loud noises in other rooms/privacy" perspective.

The downsides, cellphone reception in my house is terrible. One bar where I can get three to four bars outside. 802.11 type devices do not work in much more than the room of where the access point is located. I cannot use indoor antennas, even to pick up the nearby FM radio station ten miles away.

Upsides, computer RF noise is almost nonexistent. I do not "hear" the DVR on 40 meters. My house is very efficient with HVAC requirements and it saves me around 20% or so in energy costs. (that from my local utility that provides comparisons of electrical demand data, relative to neighbors with a similar home of construction, era and square footage).

There is a good write-up about radiant heat on this DuPoint article about Tyvekk   http://www2.dupont.com/Tyvek_Weatherization/en_US/assets/downloads/ThermaSBK14130.pdf

From an insulation standpoint a metallic foil adds an insulating value of R-2

This can be made out to be so complicated and that just scares people off.

The references the original poster made was regarding reception (scratchy signals, ergo poor receiver signal levels). It does not matter if he has an HT, mobile or base station radio. If he is non-line-of-sight and working off of reflected/refracted signals to his antenna then the only things that will help him out are height and system gain.

Poor receive signal levels are never corrected with more transmitter power on your part.

Losses due to feedline are negative gain factors. A good antenna is a positive gain factor.

Any HT on a "duckie" is going to be with a negative gain. Most duckies are on the order of -3 to -6 dBi and with their operating position (next to your head, not vertical, etc...) this is even worse.

If an extra 10' of coax will get you another 10' in the air then whatever feedline losses you encounter are more than offset by an increase in your line-of-sight distances to the radio horizon. There is a practical limit to this; assuming there is no terrain your radio horizon is;

10' height        4 miles
20' height        6 miles
30' height        8 miles
40' height        9 miles
50' height      10 miles
60' height      11 miles
70' height      12 miles

This assumes that the receiving site at the other end is at ground level (0 feet) if they have height then the two radio horizons are added to give a much longer path distance (example, you at 30', the repeater at 50', (8+10=18) 18 miles point to point line-of-sight).
http://www.qsl.net/w4sat/horizon.htm

Usually someone is higher up, a repeater mounted on a tower on a hill. All of that needs to be taken into consideration, also any terrain that may be blocking you in the middle (path profiles at VHF/UHF) and other weird things like Fresnel zones, knife edge refraction (do not worry about that now).

Any sort of outdoor antenna at height is better than an HT duckie. Get in the air and get "on" the air.

The QTH forum is very active, there are a few hundred of us on there.

Something to think about too;

Attaching copper directly to aluminum can result in corrosion as the electrochemical potentials are different. A direct connection will act like a battery with the aluminum as an anode and the copper as a cathode at 2.00 volts.

You would need some sort of transition metal between the two. Be careful about mechanically attaching two electrically dissimilar metals.