How to Modify Your Ham Radio to Get More Range

Video Transcript

"For Expert Village, I'm Kurt, N7QJM. Today we're continuing our series on ham radio and what fun you can do. Today we're actually out here near the antenna structure. We're doing some contesting and we're going to be using this antenna to hook it up I'm going to show you how to extend the antenna of a normal hand held rig like we have, that I've usually been showing you. So, we'll do that right now. We'll here's out hand held rig right there, and we're going to hook this particular piece up to it. This is a BNC type of connection that were making onto the ham antenna right there on this rig. I went and purchased myself some RG-8 or the type of cable here, wrapped it up like this and of course we've connected it over here to the antenna as you can see here. It's just got a PL-259 connection, these are called the elements right here. There's a number of them. I believe this is a seven element beam and it's for the 70 centimeter band that works with this particular unit here. Now, I'll show you how to hook it up. Ok, again so we have the antenna right here and we have the cable which we have connected to the antenna and now we're going to connect this end to the antenna here. So watch carefully, what I'm going to do is I'm going to twist, see if we can get in real close here, I'm going to twist the top off of this, you can see I'm twisting it off, pulling it real lightly, and it's now disconnected. Put this down over here. And now I'll take this particular connection here and luckily it actually adapts real easily, and you just put it on like so and twist it. That's it. That's how you connect it. Now lets mount the antenna so that we can get broadcasting. Ok here's the end of this one right here. We're going to actually mount the antenna using one of the elements as a stand and hook it right in here like so. So you're just going to stick that in like that to mount the antenna onto because this is equal distance and balanced real properly. We'll just stick it in there like so, we'll do that and then you raise the antenna. That's how you do that section right there. And, there's our antenna up at the top, cable feeding down along the PVC pipe as you an see and we've got a nice solid antenna facing straight west. It's a beam antenna too so you can point it in the direction that you want to broadcast. Well that is it. For the price of a cable and PVC pipe and the antenna up on the top, you can have a great long distance broadcasting mechanism for your hand held radio. Instead of this, you have a beam antenna that you can beam. So for Expert Village, I'm Kurt, N7QJM we are QRT and 73's to you."