Home > Equipment
Equipment
There is a certain amount of equipment that you will need to get on the air. Just
what that equipment is will depend on what your interests are in ham radio. If you are
interested in HF, which is more the focus of this web site, then you will need a radio,
and antenna, and feedline to connect the radio to the antenna.
It is possible to build your own radio for use on the HF frequencies, but most beginners
will want to buy their first radio. You can find reasonably nice used rigs, as radios are
often called, for as little as a couple hundred dollars.
For an antenna you can build your own out of a piece of wire. You should use at
least 14 gauge wire, but some people prefer 12 gauge. To find the length of wire you need
you can use the equation 468/f where f is the frequency in MHz that you wish to operate on. For
example to operate on 20 meters the equation becomes 468/14.1 = 33.19 ft. This is the
length of a half wavelength at the frequency of 14.100 MHz. To make a simple dipole antenna
you would then cut this piece of wire in half, and connect it to the feedline.
If you use coax feedline you should use a balun between the end of the coax and the legs of the
antenna. This is because the antenna is a balanced antenna and the coax is an unbalanced
feedline. I will explain this on a separate page, but for now I'll keep it simple. The other end of
the coax connects to the radio.
There is another route to take with the antenna and feedline. You can cut the antenna for 80
meters and feed it with twin lead feedline, or ladderline. If you use twin lead you can connect the
feedline directly to the legs of the antenna. On the other end you connect the feedline to an
antenna tuner. Then you use a short piece of coax to connect the radio to the antenna tuner.
If you use this system you have to adjust the tuner to match the antenna to the radio. This
is a little more trouble than the coax, but you can use the one antenna on multiple bands
by adjusting the tuner for each band.
This simple basic setup works amazingly well. With this same setup using radios up to 200
watts out, TV twin lead for a feedline, and wire antennas I have worked over 250 different
countries. There are advantages to using TV twin lead and wire antennas, it's cheap!