Questions tagged [discussion]
A tag for questions that may not necessarily have a clear-cut right or wrong answer and are often subjective. If it's not a bug, feature-request or request for assistance, it is probably a discussion.
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We'd like math support enabled
Some Stack Exchange sites, such as Math and Physics, allow LaTeX equations for rendering in questions and answers. For example, writing
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- 4,798
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How can we improve the activity on this site?
I don't know about you all, but I'm quite grateful to have this site as a resource. I feel like it is starting to enter a decline, which has me worried. I see fewer good questions being asked, and ...
- 6,093
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Are questions about batteries/emergency power on-topic or off-topic?
The ARRL has a book called Emergency Power for Radio Communications.
What does the community think?
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Are non Amateur Radio discussions allowed?
In Area 51, there were questions as to if GMRS and CB radio should be allowed. The overwhelmingly most popular answer was that they should be allowed, but not encouraged. Commercial radio was strictly ...
- 6,093
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Do SDR questions belong here too?
A LOT of (or maybe a few of) ham operators these days also use Software Defined Radios to gain more than what the physical hardware gives, or to monitor multiple devices simultaneously, or to modify ...
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Who should the moderators be?
Amateur Radio SE is going to need a few moderators to help steer the site during the beta phase until the site graduates and an election can be held. We're looking for folks that have a little bit of ...
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Moderator Pro Tem Announcement
Throughout the beta, we need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community ...
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Please welcome your new moderators
I'm Pops, a Community Manager at Stack Exchange. I'm here today to announce two new moderators for your community, replacing two long-serving mods who have stepped down. Please welcome:
Please join ...
- 101
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Congratulations to us—ham.SE is no longer a beta site!
As of today, 16 December 2021, ham.stackexchange.com is no longer a beta StackExchange site! We graduated along with 57 other sites. Congratulations are in order! Here's the official announcement.
...
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Topic of the Week
(Copied from Space.SE, modified to fit here)
One of the things that Stack Exchange in general has found effective is to devote a week to a specific topic in which members of the site feel is lacking. ...
- 6,093
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Are US Test Pool questions fair game for the community and/or for the beta?
Given that the answers are already known to the community, is it helpful to ask questions which are already part of the test pool? How can we get more technical questions going?
- 1,194
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How can we get people to both ask and answer questions?
I was looking at the Area 51 stats, and I noticed something interesting. With 2 exceptions, myself and Amber, every one of the users on the top page thus far has exclusively asked or answered ...
- 6,093
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Please stop giving examples in watts/fractions every time power/gain/loss is expressed in dB
So, with this cable you would have 2.45 dB of loss. $10^{-2.45/10} \approx 0.57$, so if you put 100 watts in you'll get 57 watts out.
the loss increases very quickly. 2.45 dB might not be much loss,...
- 51.1k
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Please post questions!
I can post six unlimited questions a day, and so can you. Please try to post as many good questions as you can think of each and every day. The site activity will only increase if people know that ...
- 12.1k
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Tag synonym request: license / licence
We currently have licence and license tags, with seemingly zero overlap. These two should really be merged and established as synonyms. I recommend the US English spelling ...
- 4,798
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Ambiguous questions - A plea for more context
Coming from other stack exchange sites, I have been a bit disturbed when I see so many vague questions like these (my personal reactions are included after the "<--"):
Basic QSO format <-- This ...
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How can I build a _____?
There are not a small number of questions that ask about how to build something not too specific:
Low parts count CW HF receiver?
How can I construct a practical loop antenna for 2m band?
Is there a ...
- 51.1k
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Google, easy, and "I'm looking for" vs expert questions
So I'm a bit torn. I've long supported the idea that we should be asking expert questions, but I'm not an expert in this area and can't support that mission much in terms of asking questions. I'm ...
- 12.1k
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Increasing the Number of Questions per Day
I was looking at the Area 51 statistics for our site early today:
What stands out is the low average number of questions per day. We seem to be doing quite well on all other metrics but the 1.9 ...
- 18.4k
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Community Promotion Ad Design
To help advertise the site, we should have one or more banners for the StackExchange Community Promotion Ads. For anyone not familiar with them, these are basically ads that we get to place on other ...
- 1,891
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Should questions on broadcast radio be specifically off topic?
We have had a few questions that deal specifically with broadcast radio. That is, some form of one-to-many transmissions, occasionally on frequency bands specifically assigned to broadcast radio as ...
- 4,798
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Why bumping a question which is dormant while OP is absent for long time
My question is about this question
As you can see, it was "bumped" recently
The following to note from this post:
Originally posted on 18-July-2017
User last seen on 25-July-2017
I understand that ...
- 2,107
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Later this year, hamSE may no longer be a beta site. What will happen?
Per this answer in a related question, we might come out of beta in late October.
What will happen then?
Will there any advantages, etc. of no longer being a beta site?
We need to prepare a logo or ...
Mike WatersMod
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What tags to use for questions concerning someone's shack
Currently we have ham-setup and installation. Currently the questions are about someone's shack.
Do we want to use a shack tag for these?
There are 582,000 google hits for: "Amateur Radio" shack
...
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Please welcome your newest pro tem moderator
I'm Pops, a Community Manager at Stack Exchange. As some of you may have noticed, one of your moderators recently stepped down for personal reasons. I'm happy to announce that a great new pro tem mod ...
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2021 Community Moderator Election Results
Moderator election #1 on Amateur Radio has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the new pro-temp moderators are:
They will be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for ...
- 101
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What should the help center read about on-topic and off-topic questions?
Each Stack Exchange site has a Help Center page What topics can I ask about here? detailing the scope of the site in question.
Ours is still a default stub:
Please look around to see if your ...
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To what extent are "recommend a solution" questions allowed
Obviously a question like "where can I buy X" is not on topic, but there is a valid question right now of chinese-brand vs established-brand HTs. This is more of a continuum than an easy ...
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How to encourage specifying one's locale?
This is peripherally related to What about 'localized' questions?, but I have a feeling that the answer will be somewhat different so am asking it as a separate question.
There has been a fair number ...
- 4,798
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What is the difference between the 'radio-terms' and 'jargon' tags?
We currently have radio-terms and jargon tags, with three questions in each and none tagged using both.
radio-terms has no tag wiki currently, whereas jargon has the following:
Questions about ...
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What should our general opinion be on jargon?
Ham radio, like many other fields, has boatloads of jargon, and it often crops up in all sorts of conversation. It's already shown up in plenty of questions asked so far, both in titles and question ...
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Will we come out of "beta" ? ... ever?
Current status is:
so, what do we need to do to come out of beta ?
- 2,107
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Should gray-area questions that are primarily theoretical be allowed here?
The designed scope of ham.stackexchange.com (ham.SE) and a few other other Stack Exchange sites overlap somewhat in what are often called "gray areas". (Or "grey areas", if you ...
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Announcing a Pro Tempore Moderator Election for 2021
Summary: Amateur Radio Stack Exchange will begin the nomination stage for a special election on August 9 to bring in two more moderators.
For full details of the process, see the announcement on Meta ...
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What are the advantages and disadvantages of the question-and-answer format in ham.SE?
New people drift into ham.stackexchange.com all the time. Many are familiar with chat-style forum sites, and are surprised by the question-and-answer format and the rules that go with it. Many don't ...
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Is anything ever closed?
I've noticed that basically nothing gets closed, ever. If something does get closed, it's by a diamond moderator, not by community voting, and even then, it's hit and miss.
There also seems to be ...
- 51.1k
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Questions that aren't off topic shouldn't be moved
There is a difference between a question that could be answered on another site, and a question which is off-topic for this site.
For instance, I'm probably going to start asking questions about Go ...
- 12.1k
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What can we do to encourage new members to be more welcomed?
I feel like we have a reasonable supply of new members coming by, but they don't seem to stick around as much as we would like. What can we do to encourage these members to stick around for more than ...
- 6,093
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What should our policy be on "somewhat" broad questions?
Quite a few questions have made it into the close vote review queue already, under the reason "Too broad", including:
How do I evaluate the features and performance of radios?
Are there well-...
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DSP questions: best here, or on dsp.se?
Lately I've been working on some digital decoders for PSK31 and RTTY. Many signal processing questions come to mind, regarding filtering, equalization, channel coding, and so on. Examples:
Applying ...
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2018: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:
We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in ...
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Antenna Theory within our Ambit
After looking at how SE EE handled a recent antenna theory question, I think we should expand our ambit to specifically include antenna theory and application - whether or not related to "radio".
Why ...
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Topic of the Week #1: Nov 17-23: radio propagation
During the week of November 17 through November 23, 2013, the Topic of the Week for Amateur Radio Stack Exchange is:
propagation
Questions dealing with the propagation of radio signals.
We ...
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How to alienate people in the US
I am growing rather tired of a pattern of behavior of jumping at every opportunity to point out every little thing that might be specific to the US. This is extremely rude. Everyone lives somewhere, ...
- 51.1k
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Is there a Plan for driving more traffic to the site?
I've noticed the steady decline of the number of unique users / day over the last few weeks. The holidays (at least in the US) aside, it seems like we need about 5x as many users/questions/answer to ...
- 6,362
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How about list questions?
How should we feel about list questions? For example, there's already How can I protect equipment against a lightning strike? which seems to beg for incomplete answers at best (because I doubt anyone ...
- 4,798
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What should the tag be for cable?
So far we have feed-line,transmission-line, and could easily create cable. What should be the term we use for the wires going between the radio and antenna?
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Let's have our own community ads!
As for other sites, SE went in and had another round of promotions. I think it's a good idea we do that, too, and even if its just to get our fingers warm when it comes to promoting this site on ...
- 14.9k
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Separate Morse tag to go along with the CW tag
Morse code is a specific way of interrupting a carrier or a current flow. Hams utilize International Morse code.
There are other ways to interrupt the carrier to send information. During WW II the ...
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Be a bit vigilant about safety-critical radio tech question
How can we be more vigilant not to "pseudo-help" people and bring them (or others) into danger that way?
Background:
Lately, someone asked a question about a Katherine antenna (Kathrein is a ...
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