It's called a product placement... You see it all the time in movies and TV, generally with beverages, cars and clothing. Kinda' rare to see an outfit like Icom get one, but the producers needed some sort of a radio and Icom didn't mind getting their name on camera. So they cut a deal.

Ever wonder why the new James Bond drives a Bimmer instead of an Aston Martin? It's all part of the image for Bond and BMW.

Make that 'condolences to the family'.

This is a loss.

I've spent plenty of time on his web site comparing his adventures in antenna modeling and considered his work to be both informative and impartial, plus he wasn't above analyzing the limitations of his analysis. That alone rated a thumbs up.

My condolences to the widow and as time rolls on I hope someone picks up the torch of objective antenna modeling and runs with it.

He will be missed.

Who said anything about 24 AWG ?

The cable described in the original post is likely Belden 9207 or similar and I just happen to have a 100' spool of the stuff in my garage so it was easy for me to reference the number. You can find the specs here:

http://www.belden.com/pdfs/03Belden_Master_Catalog/06Coaxial_Cables/06.83_90.pdf

20 AWG center conductors, 100 ohm impedance, foil under 86% braid (Duofoil), VF of .66, 2.8 dB loss per 100' @ 50 MHz, nominal OD of .330". It's a bit thicker than RG-6 (which has an 18 AWG center conductor) and about the same loss characteristics as a Siamese pair RG-59 (which uses 23 AWG center conductors).

Good choice for VHF?

Nope... But I say good enough for 100 watts at 30 MHz and below if you want a balanced line that has to go in a "ladder line hostile" location.

If you want to get into biofuels, do a little web crawling for Henry Ford and Hemp.

As far back as the 1920's it was known that hemp oil could be cracked into ethyl alcohol and was an effective fuel and octane booster for gasoline. In the 40's Ford built prototype car bodies from plasticized hemp oil using a technique similar to fiberglass today. Allegedly six times stronger than steel for the same weight and hemp is a no-brainer to farm.

Damn shame that hemp is so easily confused with marijuana as it's a very useful plant fiber. Same genus, but the THC levels in hemp are much lower.

It's called Twinax and is essentially a shielded twisted pair with controlled conductor spacing. IBM used the cable for network trunking and remote printers, typically in an AS/400 environment with an Ethernet protocol.

Characteristic impedance of the pair is 110 ohms with reasonably low loss characteristics and is generally useful up to 200 MHz. Not a bad choice as a substitute for balanced line in a hostile installation environment.

Not familiar with the Yaesu, but on both Kenwood and Icom rigs a press & hold on the CLR or M-CL button does the trick.

Not to stir the poo, but it's a damn shame some of you won't be alive 20 years from now to learn how shortsighted you're being today...

The biggest problem with hydrogen is that it's too damned easy to come by. In my part of the world both water and sunlight have been known to fall from the sky, often in great abundance. Wire a solar cell to a hydrogen still and anyone with a Popular Mechanic's understanding of the construction arts and electrolysis can manufacture hydrogen using off the shelf parts.

Today.

Yeah, but solar panels are expensive, hydrogen is explosive, it's cheaper to use conventional energy sources, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Wait.

When horseless carriages became popular it was argued they were dangerous because some could attain speeds of 20 miles per hour or more. Then someone had the first accident and proved the point. At least a horse is smart enough not to run into a brick wall, but a Model T? Not so much...

In the latter part of the 19th century gas lighting was known to be dangerous but some folks preferred it over candles or lanterns. Brighter, cleaner, less odor, and cheaper than the next big thing... Incadescent electric lighting. But somehow electric lighting caught on despite vintage arguments similar to what I see here.

Edison and Westinghouse fought PR battles over the safety of AC vs DC because everyone knew electricity was too dangerous for home use and the choice was over the lesser of two evils. Then people started buying electric fans, toasters, refrigerators, Victrolas, Radiolas, etc and there was no going back.

Sure... Hydrogen can explode. As can natural gas and gasoline. Yet both are routinely transported by pipeline, rail and truck. Funny thing about hydrogen... Since it's so much lighter than air it dissipates more readily than natural gas or propane, and it damn sure won't run down a street and collect in a sewer line like gasoline will.

But... Somehow... We've managed to build millions of gas stations and automobiles over the past 100 years without serious consequence. The Ford Pinto and original Mustang excepted, but it can be argued that was more of a corporate ethics issue than the nature of the fuel.

Another problem with hydrogen is that anyone can build a production facility anywhere without undue concerns over local pollution and carbon footprint regs. It's inherently clean, much more so than coal or petroleum, and requires no drilling, waste disposal, or location convenient to a natural deposit of hydrocarbons. A hydrogen plant doesn't stink like a refinery and that opens up a near infinite number of possibilities for local production by private industry and municipal governments.

Which reduces the transportation overhead. That's called a Win-Win situation. But... It's a threat to the multinational oil cartels, therefore it must be a bad idea.

As for the technology, Texas Instruments pioneered the integrated circuit because they could sell the equivalent of a 741 op-amp to the DoD and NASA for something like $300 each back in the day. Captive market, as both were willing to pay a premium for light and small components for their avionics. Price a 741 op-amp today. Do you think the same progression won't happen in solar and fuel cells? Like it has in most every electrical / mechanical consumer product...?

You ain't seen nothin' yet... Unless the oil lobbies continue to exercise their choke hold on alternate fuel R&D legislation... And the hell of it is, if the US had the guts to get serious about oil independence 30 years ago we probably could have been there by now.

For once, let's not continue to make the same shortsighted mistakes. It's too important this time.

And whatever happened to the old Amateur Radio tradition of garage-based R&D ?

Guess we outsourced that in the 80's...

There is probably a fancier way of doing this, but there are plenty of audio mixers and signal combiners / splitters that use a resistor network to mix inputs or share a load.

You should be able to tie the ground side of all three rigs together then run three 4 or 8 ohm resistors from the hot side of all three speaker jacks to the hot side of the common speaker. 2-5 watts should be plenty for the resistors, although I do wonder if the audio coming back to the unused rigs might cause some damage.

It's not unusual to bridge power amp outputs together in PA applications but the amps are rated as 'bridgeable' and they're running in phase. One or more of your radios might not be as forgiving...

For another idea, an Arcnet passive hub uses four 93 ohm resistors in a diamond arrangement with the center pin of a BNC at each of the four resistor junctions. Common ground on all outer shells. Visualize the same thing with 4 or 8 ohm resistors and you'd have three IN and one OUT. Doesn't matter which point is considered IN, it's balanced either way.

You will lose signal through either setup, but without a switch I doubt there's a way to avoid that.

?

Consider a solar panel to power a hydrogen still or a new-tech solar setup with batteries and an inverter. Costs are almost all up front, but once it's running the maintenance costs are very low.

I've been considering going semi-solar but that may be a year or more down the road. My breaker panel is split so it would be very easy to run the lighting and wall outlets from solar while retaining commercial power for the HVAC equipment. That way I can miser the lighting during the winter when the days are short (if I have to) without too much overbuilding and still have heat when I need it. During the summer I'll have daylight to spare but it takes a bunch of batteries to keep an AC running.

For Your Consideration:

Regardless of the physical size of a meter movement the reading still comes down to a needle. You may not need to read the scale as the angle tells the tale, but the needle is still going to be narrow.

National Semi sells 10 segment bar graph / moving dot LED driver chips like the LM3914, LM3915 and LM3916 which can be cascaded if you want 20 or 30 steps of resolution and drive an LED directly. If a person wanted clusters or strings of parallel LED's per segment the chip can drive a medium signal transistor adequate to sink the load at 20-30 mils per LED. Buy enough Green, Yellow and Red LED's and the display could be big enough to read across the street by size & color... Straight line bar, moving dot, circle or even a fan display.

Be the first kid on your block to have a Fan S-Meter.

The LM3914 is 10 step linear:

http://www.national.com/mpf/LM/LM3914.html

The LM3915 is 10 step logarithmic @ 3 dB per step:

http://www.national.com/mpf/LM/LM3915.html

The LM3916 is an electronic VU meter for audio applications:

http://www.national.com/mpf/LM/LM3916.html

Note the 8 and 16 LED low power versions mentioned on each spec sheet. Could be a plan.............

A high stability LO is most advantageous during the first 10 minutes or so of operation. Some rigs need a little more time to settle, other a little less.

After that both the hi-stab and standard rocks will stabilize to the point where drift is not likely to be an issue.

A directional gain antenna of some sort will definitely improve your signal strength in a given direction, but no matter how much RF you pump into a band that isn't exactly open... You still won't have a path.

Sporadic E tends to run 'spotty' and generally at distances of 1,200 miles or less. Often much less. By 'spotty' I mean this: Used to run a Six meter FM net and we had an E opening one night. Local group was spread out over 30 miles or so and some could hear the DX while others couldn't. Within the span of 15 minutes the E shifted and those who were Q-Zilch came up to Q-5 and vice versa.

AK and HI are long for E but not for F layer propagation. Give it a few years and it could happen, but you'll still note some spottiness in the coverage. I've listen to stations 40-50 miles away working a contest on 20 and making Q's I couldn't hear.

Skip Zone and like that.

What a beam could do for you is to make your call the first heard and the last to fade during an opening when both ends of the circuit are in the right place at the right time.

" Perhaps I'm touchy because I'm tired of the immediate assumption many "Elmers" make that I've done no homework before asking a question. "

Try and help a guy out...............

Perhaps your question gave no hint of any research on your part or that anything was done beyond forgetting that it was LMR-600.

Next time you're at the local handy guy store, pick up a coil of irrigation pipe in the 3/4" flavor. Buy it, bury it, shove your coax through it.

And there's your answer.

Lookee there... What Mr. Google found!

http://timesmicrowave.com/content/pdf/lmr/28-31.pdf