Patrick Maun wrote: > I'd love to hear which radio people are using that are stronger than 5W > that is also handheld, *and* contains a VHF radio. It is next to impossible > to pick up weather when out in the Apostle Islands. The Radio Shack route > just doesn't seem to work. Any tips? The biggest problem with all hand-held radios is that they have crummy antennas. Those little "rubber ducks" are very lossy and have extrememly poor transmit *and* receive performance. The first thing you could do to make them work better would be to stash the duck and replace it with a simple whip antenna approximately 14" long. That's an electrical quarter wave at 170MHz, which should cover WX and Marine bands well. Even better would be a mast with a real marine antenna attached to your boat. You could even put a radar reflector on the tip of the mast if you wanted. A proper half wave vertical would do wonders. I've never experiemented with marine VHF, but using a halfway decent antenna on a friend's sailboat on the amateur 2M band (146MHz, which is pretty close) we were able to cover hundreds of miles in good conditions with 25 watts. -- mike ---------------------------------------- Michael J Edelman mje_at_mich.com http://www.mich.com/~mje http://www.mich.com/~mje/kayak.html http://www.mich.com/~mje/scope.html *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.gasp-seakayak.net/paddlewise/ ***************************************************************************Received on Sun Mar 01 1998 - 14:45:16 PST
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