Before I was licensed I purchased the obvious first radio, a Baofeng UV5R handheld. There’s so much hate around these cheap Chinese radios but it was a great first radio for me. Whilst I had much experience talking through repeaters on marine radio you don’t have to program anything or think too much about how they work, just dial up channel 16 and call Tas Maritime. Now I had to know about frequencies, offsets, CTCSS tones and work out how to get that programmed into the radio. It also allowed me to become familiar with on air procedure and listen to the weekly amateur radio broadcast.
Like everything I do, I researched the crap out HF radios, and since I was originally planning to get a Foundation level license which is limited to 10W max power decided on an ICOM IC-705. This wasn’t cheap but it should have been all the radio I would ever need.
Living in an apartment complex antenna’s were always going to be an issue. The first question was how on earth do I get coax from outside to inside? Everyone has opinions and different methods but I worked out my own. I found a green plastic box made by Arlec at Bunnings intended to house extension cord connections. Only $19!! I drilled out a largish hole in the wall on the other side of my desk, opened a matching hole on the back of the box, cut some old innertube to squish between the box and the wall to keep the bugs and wind out and whacked it on the wall.
I really wanted a DX Commander but that was never going to fly. No room for radials and someone would have complained about the pole height. I settled on a 12m long compromise end fed halfwave (EFHW) wire antenna from HyEndFed. This would cover the 10/20 & 40m bands. I strung it up the side of the deck and across to the top of a tree in my front yard in an inverted L shape. The feed point was just above the ground. Everything about it was wrong but it worked. Some time later I pulled down my unused Foxtel dish and put a Diamond V2000 to cover VHF/UHF and 6m bands in its place.
VK7ID 