Bet some bacteria would feed on it anyway if you give it enough time

never have to shower again

Some marketing claims should remain untested

Agents md file doesn’t actually do anything except using more tokens https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11988

Moxon is very slightly shortened 2el yagi. That other thing is effectively weird phased array of two almost halfwave dipoles, and it’s both worse and bigger, and also harder to make because it requires capacitors for gamma match

(Current rabbit hole: Should a HB9CV’s boom be conductive and electrically bonded to its elements?)

Yes it has to be, that’s how you feed its two elements. Boom is at zero electrical potential and forms half of transmission line that goes to gamma matches of both parts of antenna, and you can attach it to perpendicular conductive mast, or extend it for mounting to mast (has to be perpendicular if mast is metal)

Personally, i’d go with 4el yagi if we’re talking portable operation, because boom length is such that you can make it out of plastic tube and hide elements in it when moving around. Or moxon, if size of 4el yagi is prohibitive. Moxon gets you 2db more gain than HB9CV in similar footprint

openhamprep explanation is wrong

When you consider a segment of wire, it has some inductance and capacitance in that small segment, and the wider it is, the lower inductance and higher capacitance are. In other words, both X_L and X_C go down as diameter increases. Electric field lines within antenna are mostly perpendicular to wire everywhere except on ends, where they spread in all directions, which means that there’s some residual capacitance there that needs to be charged each cycle. This is called end effect and the wider wire is, the more of it you get. In fact, the same aspect ratio (length/diameter) gets you the same end effect ratio each time, and it’s usually in range of 0.98-0.95. If there’s insulation, then insulation has lower velocity of propagation as it has higher permittivity than air, and it is in place with highest electric field intensity, and this can also shorten necessary wire length a couple %. The more insulation there is, the more shortened antenna becomes. have a calculator: https://www.translatorscafe.com/unit-converter/en-US/calculator/dipole-antenna/

But wait, there’s more. We can think of antenna as a lossy RLC resonator (sort of), where R is Rrad which for halfwave dipole would be 72 ohms, + loss resistance which is smaller, and neither are changing fast with frequency. What is changing faster is X_L and X_C, and the wider wire is, the smaller both of them are (X_L = -X_C at resonance), and this means that you can go further off frequency and still have acceptable SWR, i.e. antenna made with wider wire has more bandwidth. For HF this means using masts or wire cages instead of single wire, but for VHF this gets more practical

Resistive part of antenna impedance near resonance depends on physical antenna length, and if antenna is shortened, then how it was done, but for the range we’re here it won’t change much. But also it will depend on height above ground, type of soil, antenna geometry and many other things. 72 ohm is in freespace only

you can consider antenna wire as a transmission line, but it will need to include ground as the other side of transmission line, and then impedance is dependent on wire diameter to height over ground ratio. it’s not very useful except when considering very large and currently uncommon types of antennas (beverage antenna and rhombic antenna, both of which are traveling wave antennas)

careful, they might like it

humans start breathing only when 3 years old, don’t you know?

that’s no problem at all, systems like that are in use

It’s easier to freeze water than to cool rock borehole

This will continue as long as there are CCGTs used as baseload, then it will drop as CCGTs (and biomass + waste burners) will cover the gaps

methane cracker? that’s a very unusual unit that outputs hydrogen and carbon. i could find info about opening of ethane cracker in 2025, but that’s for plastics, next to shutdown of another similar unit

Lithium-iron is about 2x more expensive, there might be different availability and energy use during manufacture is probably higher

Lead-acid batteries work if you don’t care about weight and lithium-iron phosphate if you do

there are photos of 16 different radios and a couple of antennas, but the one in thumbnail is Elecraft KH-1

ah well then yeet that and instead

pip install thefuck

add this line

thefuck --alias | source

to config.fish

sudo dnf install thefuck

It’s up for you to decide. On U/VHF you can talk to other people directly (locally) like on HF. But you can also do things that HF can’t provide, or provides with limitations, like talk through repeater (uncommon on HF), or to ISS, or through satellites (HF bounces from ionosphere) or do longer distance communications from mountaintops, or do image transmission or packet radio (HF has less bandwidth). On receive only you can also download NOAA weather satellite images, or whatever else data are emitted by them. You can make your own repeater from two baofengs. HF gets affected by space weather, U/VHF is not, and we’re entering solar minimum. 6m will take you far further than 2m but it’s usually bundled with HF radios

On higher end there’s also moonbounce, but it’s not in the budget category

e: there’s 50 things you can do with SDR only (many on U/VHF) https://blinry.org/50-things-with-sdr/