I was always interested in amateur radio and did get my Technician license in 2006 but I never got a radio and now I just successfully finished my General license testing… I’m still planing on getting the Amateur Extra class in the near future.

Anyway now it’s time for some practical Ham Radio things to be done and for that I need some equipment. I start from zero and need everything, I try to make a good starting list (08-25-2011):

1. ☑ Transceiver, maybe a FT-857D (at HRO: $804.95)
2. ☑ external SWR meter (MFJ-864 at HRO: $99.95)
3. ☑ dummy load (MFJ-262B at HRO: $59.95)
4. ☑ multi band antenna for HF
5. ☑ antenna for 2m and 70cm
6. ☑ antenna mount
7. ☑ Coax Cable (LMR-240 and or LMR-400 and or LMR-600)
8. ☑ power supply (Tripp Lite PR25 25-Amp at buy.com: $147.40 or Jetstream JTPS28 at cheapham.com: $83.95)
9. ☑ auto tuner (LDG Z-11PRO-II at HRO: $179.99)
10. ☑ usb cat cable to connect radio to PC ($40)
11. ☑ usb sound card, like microHAM or SignaLink ($100-$200).

Some stuff I don’t need yet but maybe later:

1. ☑ antenna switch
2. ☐ straight key
3. ☑ cable and hookup wire
4. ☐ Linux ham software
5. ☐ antenna analyzer (MFJ-259B $290)

I’m not sure if this is everything, but I hope this should cover most…

Here are the HEH2011 executables, one for i386 and one for amd64. It also comes with the hamdb database so there is no need to run the program to generate it. This was compiled under Ubuntu 11.04 Linux:
HEH2011.tar.gz