Commercial portable: Nagoya NA-771 (beware clones)
Commercial fixed: Diamond X30, X50 or V2000 colinear.
With any upgraded antenna on a receiver with little filtering like the Baofeng, you may deafen it into hearing no wanted signals if operating it in an RF-hot environment.
That’s a pretty narrow perspective. From both the perspective of HF and VHF/UHF.
For HF there’s all sorts of digital stuff going on. Check out FreeDV for a Codec2-derived digital voice mode. We are also doing packet radio (yes, AX.25, still built into the Linux kernel) with BPSK/QPSK modems on HF replacing the 61 year old Bell tones- see https://wiki.oarc.uk/packet:ninotnc#experimental_new_modes_f...
I recently stood up this site to support and track the re-emergence of the / redevelopment UK packet radio network- which is utilising VHF, UHF, a geostationary satellite, as well as HF.
https://ukpacketradio.network/
It’s not my bag but I see a lot of VARA going on too.
Speak to a specialist about the Stretta procedure. Application of RF energy to the lower esophageal sphincter in a short outpatient procedure. More effective than PPIs, but less so than fundoplication, which is much more invasive and permanent.
Even ignoring the impedance mismatch, loss in typical 75 ohm coax at 2.4GHz is going to be something like 0.5dB per metre. Far worse again at 5GHz. That's going to add up quickly.
Nothing stopping you setting up a whole AX.25 network between multiple machines using Dire Wolf [1] and the built-in AX.25 [2] (a derivation of X.25) support still in the Linux kernel. You get a proper network interface that shows up alongside eth0. Nice short instructions at [3]. Just don't hook it up to radios unless you're appropriately licensed. Speakers and mics only.
PSA: Pi 4 + M.2 SATA SSD + USB3 adapter is blisteringly fast. No micro SD card needed any more. Runs Ubuntu x64 and Docker.
Even better with a heat-dissipating case with an integrated M.2 SATA port in the bottom, like the Argon ONE M.2.
I use mine to run multiple .NET 6 microservices, and it's replaced an entire HP Microserver. The entire Pi setup will have paid for itself in under a year in energy savings alone.
For every engineer on six figures there will be many many of them on five figures. We read about six-figure engineer salaries because people write about them. $100k is well above the US median. I don't think there should be an absolute expectation that every engineer position earns $100k even at 10 years experience. Some will, but many won't.
I'm looking right now at a mtr (traceroute) screen from a rural fibre-to-the-premises broadband connection in Lancashire, north-west UK, achieving 2.5ms RTT to Manchester (the nearest major city, ~60km) and 8.5ms RTT to London (~325km). Things are improving.
That's only ~10x and ~8x the light travel time, assuming straight lines which is best case. ~8.3x and ~5.3x respectively if you consider that light is much slower in fibre than air.
"Huge" is probably not that big vs VLF. Maybe on the order of ~50m width (~3MHz / ~100m wavelength for ~50m half-wave antennas). VLF is more like wires across entire valleys - kilometres.
Many of the red areas I see on the map, particularly in France, are fairly obviously where someone's been running a TomTom while on a train or a boat. Of course that's not going match OSM roads. I'm a little surprised this is not mentioned in the blog post - it seems a bit obvious.
The experience operating sats is very different depending on where you are on the globe. Advice that's okay in one place may be bad advice in a different location.
One final heads-up, the vertical antennas typically fitted to vehicles make really poor satellite antennas because you can easily emit enough power to make it into the sat, but there isn't enough directional gain to hear the downlink, so you're back in the same situation. A dual band yagi antenna really is the way to go. You also don't want to use a mobile radio with a yagi unless it's turned down to low power, because of RF exposure limits at VHF/UHF. A typical portable station is a dual band yagi (e.g. Arrow II) with one FD or two HD handheld radios, a headset, and a voice recorder, and a typical fixed setup is az-el rotator with computer control, dual circularly polarised X-quad yagis, masthead preamplifiers, and Doppler control of uplink and downlink frequencies.
With respect, this is nonsense.