Dan, I can confirm that an HT with a homebrew antenna is perfectly adequate for uplinking to a repeater.
My “base station” for a few months following my tech exam was a 10y/o IC-W32 and vertical dipole made of a wooden ruler, 12AWG electrical wire, GoPro mount, and BNC cable from a UHF microphone system. If anyone’s made a J-pole from those same materials, I’d like to hear about it! I’m still interested in an antenna building class with the club if anyone else is too. N5HCU built 2m tape measure Yagis a while back, and even that taught me a ton. [A person in a suit smiling Description automatically generated] Blake Alley | BAA Electronics QRZ: N5BAA Mobile: (281) 450-5785 [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [A blue circle with white letters on it Description automatically generated]<https://www.linkedin.com/in/baaelectronics/> [A red and white play button Description automatically generated] <https://www.youtube.com/@baaelectronics> [A blue circle with a white v in the middle Description automatically generated] <https://vimeo.com/baaelectronics> [A logo of a camera Description automatically generated] <https://www.instagram.com/baaelectronicsyt/> From: BVARC <[email protected]> on behalf of Daniel Poirot via BVARC <[email protected]> Date: Wednesday, September 3, 2025 at 11:23 AM To: BRAZOS VALLEY AMATEUR RADIO CLUB <[email protected]> Cc: Daniel Poirot <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [BVARC] The Stir Crazy Net is here for you! AND... We also chatted about the intersection of new users, space-constrained antennas, low-cost handhelds, and hands-on projects! The common Baofeng UV-5R has some limitations with the stock antenna. A gain antenna, like the J pole, can do all the good! Friends in apartments, townhouses, and aggressive HOA-spaces can still make good use of the J pole planted in a flower pot or five gallon bucket! Every new Ham, and any interested parties, can learn a lot from building antennas. The Golden Path of antenna building might look a lot like dipole, 1/4 wave ground plane, J pole, Slim Jim. Cool, huh! I think we could manage a guided tutorial on antenna building! So, friends such as N5BAA, with something like a HT, and a J pole in a bucket can really reach out! (lazy Clue metaphor) Thoughts? 73 Dan KJ5IZK On Tue, Sep 2, 2025 at 8:25 PM Daniel Poirot <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: We had a great chat today on 146.94 at 12:00 We even had a drop-in from the east coast (I think). Our out of town guest offered up an interesting Raspberry Pi-based Ham Radio project - sBitx<https://www.sbitx.net/> The sBitx is a 25 watt, high performance SDR<https://www.hfsignals.com/index.php/sbitx-v3/> that you can easily build, it has all popular digital modes like FT8 integrated. This reminded me of my interest in the Raspberry Pi-based WSPR project: RaspberryPi WSPR Node : 7 Steps<https://www.instructables.com/RaspberryPi-WSPR-Node/> So cool! Everyone should do one! 73 Dan KJ5IZK
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