[amsat-bb] Re: current handheld

[Gordon JC Pearce]

On Sun, 2010-03-07 at 19:51 -0500, Jeff KB2M wrote:
> Years ago I did a test of the various handheld radio's available for sat
> use. I rated the TH-F6A a distant last. Reason is that its front-end is very
> sensitive to inter-mod. The test was performed in front of HRO in DE. See my
> HT test report on my webpage. It can be found by navigating to QRZ.com then
> lookup kb2m. I also remember when I was on a business trip to Houston. While
> there I meet with Jerry k5oe, Bruce kk5do, and Al n5afv for dinner(I have a
> picture of the group if anyone is interested). After dinner we went to the
> parking lot to work an FM bird. As my F6A was deaf from the urban inter-mod
> I had to borrow someone's HT to finish making a contact. When I got home I
> sold the Kenwood. It might be good out in the country, but it sucks in the
> city!...

I found that my TH-F7E is badly affected by "pager rip" in certain spots
around Glasgow, especially with an external antenna.  Oddly enough, some
of the high sites on tower blocks I maintain are really bad, and some
are practically silent.

Using it for satellite it seems that the diplexer in my homebrew crossed
yagi knocks enough of the out-of-band crap out to prevent this.  It's
not nearly so bad for intermod on UHF as it is on VHF, too.  This could
be because there are fewer UHF high-power paging transmitters here (just
a wee bit of mobitex, mostly).

Gordon MM0YEQ