Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I was looking around my shack and noticed that I have lots of different amateur radio tools that go beyond the simple bits and pieces that I started with, namely a radio, battery, power supply, coax and antenna. While I have no illusion that my gear is complete, or even representative of all of the stuff that you might need or come across, I think that it's worth while to mention a few bits and pieces that you may not have considered. I think the first thing I got that wasn't part of the basic kit, was a dummy load. It's only a little one, rated at 50 Watts or so, but seeing that I'm only using 5, that's more than enough. I use it to check things like VOX sensitivity, that is, I want to set-up a way to talk into my radio without having to push a button - for when I'm doing a contest, and I don't actually want to transmit any signal while testing, so I plug in the dummy load and test with that. I also use it to plug into the end of a piece of coax that I'm testing. I can t