i should be writing

  • 1 Post
  • 672 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 8th, 2023

help-circle
  • Check first on a smith chart whether transmission line that you can easily make or get and adjust its length has proper impedance for both source and antenna. The shorter length matching section has, the wider bandwidth you’ll get. There are typically two solutions, of which one is better. Ideally you’d like to have transmission line impedance a bit lower than what would be needed if only transmission line part was used (without stub)

    If you want to make a yagi, or mount antenna close to a mast and don’t care particularly hard about extremely uniform coverage, you can modify impedance by changing distance to reflector. If you want to use something like this https://www.wa5vjb.com/yagi-pdf/cheapyagi.pdf then this antenna (radiating element) is already unbalanced and doesn’t need balun that badly


  • I don’t know if you need common current mode choke like this, it’s probably overkill, popping 3-4 ferrite beads on normal sized coax should be enough. Some people don’t even use it at all and things still work for them. You can also always use folded balun or sleeve balun as a common mode current choke. This toroid is only 20mm in diameter or so, and RG174 has minimum bending radius 6mm, so it’s abused a bit but not that much. It’s probably good for lower bands like 6m too. Alternative is to use a pair of twisted wire in parallel (these have 100 ohm impedance or so, two in parallel are closer to 50) wound on ferrite (more common on HF), and if size restrictions exist, you can use tall and narrow non-split ferrite bead instead of wide and short toroid like this one i’ve used. Also i made it this way because that’s what i had in my drawer. Maybe it was not balun that was narrowband, but radiating element is a limitation instead?



  • not much? i don’t have scale but 150g perhaps? i think that if you don’t need it waterproof then you can just extend wires, use them for support and get rid of case entirely. this would require sturdier shorting bar and some spacers probably but would be more compact

    it’s 80cm long and can’t be folded, so if that’s portable enough for you, then yes

    the point of this antenna is that it has something about 2-3dB gain over dipole, if you don’t need this a lots of smaller antennas with dipole gain exist

    e: and also despite what its size could suggest it’s a single band antenna, this one is for 70cm but if you have space for 2m (2.3m long) then i think it still should be practical


















  • republicans chasing ghosts, episode 2137

    outside of silicon valley marketing materials, lab-grown meat is ridiculously expensive or straight up doesn’t exist. deer has immune system, grasshopper has immune system, stainless steel reactor full of cell suspension doesn’t. in order to prevent entire batch turning into mold or something, every starting material has to be pharma-grade and every operation has to be performed in sterile technique. it’s all fine for products like insulin or vaccines where single dose fits easily in sub-mg range, but if you try to price meat like this, it won’t be ever competitive for this reason alone.

    but it gets worse, because people who try to do that are some random techbros without engineering background. strangely enough, this doesn’t matter, because every enterprise of this kind just rides on VC money. predictably, they burn it all. as long as you can attract it, things are good and for that all you need is good pitch. We’ll solve single cell meat with nanotechnology! We’ll solve single cell meat with 3d-printing! We’ll solve single cell meat with blockchain! We’ll solve single-cell meat with chatbots!

    if you believe these people, world is simple and future is bright. i know many of you all on lemmy do.

    i’ll say more: these people are selling imagined future where you can save the world in some measure (go vegan), and you don’t have to give up anything in the process (eating meat), as long as you Buy Our Product! then there are credulous marks primed for luxurious gay space consumerism, but magic tech that allows for it is just beyond the corner, then they disappear. but people still believe, and are disappointed when they have to make even tiny sacrifice on their own. newsflash dipshit: future won’t be convenient