Starting Out in Amateur Radio

Are you, like me, pretty new to amateur radio?  I got my licence 15 years ago, forgot a lot of what I used to pass the dreaded exam, and now find myself re-learning a lot to keep in line on air!

My first transceiver - Kenwood's sturdy TS-50, complete with trademark very good audio.

I've read more than a small library on amateur radio since the end of 2009.  Added to that are the endless hours on-line, which seems to produce a lot of opinion but little by way of consensus!  It's a certainty that, if one person loves a G5RV and has used it most of his transmitting life, someone else will trash it as useless.  That kind of thing is really not very helpful!

My e-bay-acquired Kenwood TS-50 arrived in as-new condition; it evidently had not seen much use in its several years of life.  But what did I do with it?  I had no coax, plugs, ATU, or even a power supply.  Worst of all, I had no antenna!

A small battery pack kept me going for a few weeks.  It didn't allow for much more than 50W output, and even then, it had to be permanently on recharge or otherwise recharged after an hour or so of working.  Not ideal!

Once the power was running, I decided I'd run a long wire of a semi-random length out of the shack (read 'kitchen'), up to the chimney and down as a sloper to the end of our admittedly quite large garden.

It works, but I wouldn't recommend it - at all!

Did it work?  Yep!  In no time at all, I was speaking to people Very Far Away (VFA) - some were in the USA and others in the Bahamas!  Amazing for such a simple set-up.

But it came at a price.  Although the wire would tune 40-10m, it was a bit of a wild child.  Very twitchy to tune, needing steady hands in places!  It also had the nasty habit of bringing in RF into the shack - a well-known problem with these types of antennae.  On occasion, so much came in that I'd get a nasty RF burn as it skipped across the microphone.  Not exactly very painful, but not to be recommended for human or transceiver.  Occasionally, on some frequencies, it wouldn't shock me but would lead to poor audio; you can hear the interference in your headphones and it's rather pointless trasnsmitting under those circumstances. 

I stuck with this wire for a month or so whilst I waited for new stuff to arrive in the post.  Despite its problems, which forced no more than 50W output to keep the shack RF under control, I managed one morning to work Australia long path.  Not bad for what is probably one of the worst antennae you can imagine!

So, where did I go next?  Tune-in soon to find out!