W2MC

Having been in Sarco and having seen some of the stuff Sarco sells.......these have to be completely hopeless as gun stocks.

I have been thinking of selling my Icom IC-751. Its an older HF (10-160 Meter) that looks/runs like this one: It has the (optional) built-in power supply and the wideband (AM) filter installed - all you need to do is plug it in and operate. I've used it for Field Day for several years, and most recently I used it on 20 and 10 meters during the NJ QSO Party - a friend an I operated as a rover in every Southern NJ county during the weekend contest. You would need some sort of antenna, such as a wire dipole, some feed line, and probably a tuner-unless you cut the wire antenna to a single band. It does not have a built-in tuner. More instruction on how it works is here: Let me know if you're interested. Jon W2MC

My advice to those who are considering a technician license - get one of the Q and A books - there are several out there, and read it thru two or three times looking ONLY AT THE RIGHT ANSWERS. When you take the exam, which will be a test of 35 of the same questions you have just been reading, your mind will be drawn to the correct answers; because you wont be familiar with the wrong ones. You need to make 70 or 75% (I forget which) to pass the exam, and in a few days the FCC will issue you a callsign and you can start talking instead of just listening. When you're ready, you can test over at West Berlin NJ - my club runs testing for FREE at a place (roughly) behind the Walmart on Rt 73 every second Wednesday of the month. Might even meet me there... And I second Grumpy's advice...Get your Technician License (the test isn't hard), get on the air with that HT and see what it does before you start sweating this other stuff.

It all depends on what you want to do......do you want to listen to every band, like a scanner, or just the ham bands? The antenna you point out is designed to perform in the ham bands....it wont be much better than a coathanger elsewhere. If you want to listen as a scanner, you might do better to get a receiver and a wideband antenna, like a discone. The discones do not have a tremendous amount of gain, but they make up for it by being extremely wide banded. A discone looks something like this: http://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-013537 its $39.95, and comes with 50 feet of coax...note that the coax is rg-58; perfectly fine for receiving, but not great for transmitting-its very lossy at these frequencies. Your baofeng is designed to be good on the ham bands, but is so so elsewhere. This discone will listen wherever the baofeng can, and the height gain will at least make up for the cable losses if/when you transmit as well.

Congrats on the easy fix. When you are looking at batteries, you want to know two things. First is the size - its gotta fit in the car. You already know the car will hold a type 24 and a type 35. Those numbers indicate the case dimensions, the terminals, and which side the positive terminal is on. Second is a rating called "CCA" - that means Cold Cranking Amps....its really is a rating of how much power the battery can put out at zero degrees F for 30 seconds. The higher the number, the more overall guts the battery has. (Make sure you are comparing apples to apples, tho...there's another rating - "CA" - Cranking Amps - which is tested at 32 degrees,...and results in a higher number than the CCA rating.) I also agree with several commentors.....Walmart puts out a pretty good battery for the price.

Or in the case of mine....a lot of new plumbing, a new soil line for the house, You never know what you're going to find after you get started...there's always a surprise.

In the previous (now locked) discussion, Arthur Kill made the statement: ""Confiscate?" Show me where any sitting governmental authority legitimately expressed a desire to confiscate America's firearms? Any? And yes, that's EXACTLY what I'm telling you -- if the NRA "just sat down" in a genuine way, we the people, would have less of our second amendment rights eroded today." In NJ, it already has. Loretta Wienberg was caught on open mic saying exactly what you believe won't happen. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/10/anti-gun-dems-shocking-hot-mic-comments-confiscate-confiscate-confiscate/ The problem, IMHO, is that EVERY "compromise" proposed begins with our side giving up something, and their side giving up nothing. And, for a long time, the firearm owners crowd went along with it...until they started to notice that their rights were being whittled-away, while nothing was being done or given-up by the other side. Sounds a lot like the Israelii--Palestine "Land for Peace"....Israel gave up a lot of land for absolutely no peace. Didnt take THEM long to say "screw this!" No wonder the NRA wont give an inch anymore...

Newtonian: I'm waiting for Arthur Kill to step up and claim he made this arrest and thanks to his testimony the perp got life without parole, but before sentencing he was eaten by a wild Bengal tiger in Carney's Point.

I haven't been asked the weapon question...If I ever am, I am tempted to reply "I am at the wheel of a two ton blunt instrument, and you ask if I have any weapons????"

Concur.....that is about as stupid as it gets....

I got stopped for a stupid seatbelt violation last year (I usually have it on, but of course, ONE time.....and in my own town, no less). During the stop, I was asked 2-3 times "Where are you going/where are you heading?"...with more insistence each time (as I essentially ignored the question). "To work" finally quieted that line of questioning, but yes, they ARE asking, and yes, it IS a fishing expedition for them.

Will the last one to leave FaceBook please turn-off the lights?

Beautiful!

Facebook has no reason to support this and a LOT of reasons to fight it. That one will be in the courts for years and years.

Good grief..... I don't know where to start. I'm also part of the 'over 50' crowd, and I remember the days of the $89 SKS, $99 Ruger 10/22, $200 pinned/recessed Model 19s, or the $150 thompson/center smoke poles and even the Colt $350 king cobras or $500 Pythons. Be sure to let me know when you're ready to sell some of your shootin' irons for what you paid for them back in the 70's, 80's, or 90's. Never mind that your $89 SKS is now worth over $350, or that new 10/22 goes for the same, and you can't touch a decent Python for less than $2000....I'd hate to see you be accused trying to "Make A Profit".... Also.......just Sayin'....

"Illegal Gun Sellers"? I must say that I have NEVER seen an "Illegal" sales request on FB, and I have trolled their system for several years. Please elaborate on who is an "Illegal Gun Seller"

As several have suggested - you are well-past time to lawyer-up.

"leggo my egg roll!"

Ha! Serves you Pennsylvanians right for electing that leftist governor!

Without getting too deep into inverter technology; power conversion is never loss-less. Your Harbor Freight inverter is probably running at 50% conversion efficiency, at best, and there is a significant draw regardless of the connected load. It's also placing a pretty good demand on that little 14 Ah gell-cell to produce it. Gell-cells 'like' relatively light current draws for long periods of time, and don't 'like' being drawn-down too far.

Sounds VERY nice!

Well........as with everything, "it depends". My "8-gun" cabinet was purchased at K-Mart about 20 years ago, and its the only one I've had. Looks a lot like this one (well, at least it did when it was new): http://cdn2.armslist.com/sites/armslist/uploads/posts/2011/05/30/142592_02_homak_8_gun_cabinet_640.jpg It was called an "8-gun" because the foam backer/separator (a stick-on with double-faced tape) had 8 barrel notches on it. I added the "pistol cabinet" as a bolt-on to the top about a year or two later. If memory serves, there are currently 20 "long" guns in there (including two with scopes attached). Some are stored butt-down, some are stored muzzle-down. That alone saves considerable space inside the cabinet. The best thing you can do is take that foam separator out and throw it away. It will deteriorate in 5-10 years into some sort of sticky goo that thankfully, Hoppe's #9 will take off the barrels. It separates each gun from the other, and it makes them look good as a display, but it also restricts what you can put into there. I replaced the foam on the back and on the bottom with some old "fake fur" that my wife had lying around from some sewing project. Its pretty good padding, and being a synthetic, It won't hold moisture against the metal. As with anything, YMMV. You have to be gentle moving stuff around in there, and you may have to take a couple out to get at the one in the back, but the cheap little $100 cabinet has served me well.

You've been out? Sorry to hear it!

Guess I had better get some gas for the ginny and the snowblower

There's a long list of people who will help...