When I got my ticket -- and I should say for the record I've had no kind of mentors or influencers or friends into radio; I just woke up one morning and thought, "You know, I should check out amateur radio." -- I had this vision of turning my office into a shack with the financial outlay being the only real obstacle.

My house is built with this bizarre chicken wire-like mesh in the walls that, I have read, acts as a kind of Faraday cage. This makes working indoors dicey at best. I read about hams setting up antennae in the attic to get around this but my attic, and where my room is, are just not configured for that.

I am squeamish about putting holes in my house. I don't know what I am doing, and where I am drilling, and I understand that it is probably best to set up a drip loop outside. But I've not only never done this; I've never seen it done. Are there professionals I could pay to do this right -- like do people who hook up TV aerials understand the needs of amateur radio generally? If I could be assured the hole, cabling, and roof-mount antenna could be installed properly, I'd be more confident. I understand that this violates the DIY orientation of most hams, but I'm just not willing to take this risk blindly by doing it myself.

My questions are as follows:

1. Is there a common solution here whereby a receiver/transmitter can be placed outside or wirelessly in the attic, which could work remotely with equipment in my room? Wires are the issue. There's power in the attic; outdoor would even be better.

2. Is there some other solution to this issue, besides moving, that I'm not thinking of?

3. And slightly off-topic, perhaps, what of shortwave? I do enjoy listening to shortwave and would like something outside, similarly, to receive shortwave transmissions. My question is, most shortwave antennas I see are basically just wires. Do they make shortwave roof-mount antennae, and if I wanted one, how do you align these relative to, say, an antenna for 2m/70cm? How far apart do they have to be?

If I sound kinda ignorant, I'm not going to pretend I didn't just memorize the question banks for the technician license, but I've been kinda stuck here for ten years. In a decade, I transmitted exactly once: I did a single radio check and got yelled at because there was some kind of roger beep turned on that I didn't even realize existed as a feature in the radio, which made the person receiving go instantly unhinged.

I have upgraded from a cheap Baofeng to a Yaesu FT-60, the closest thing I could find to a universally-liked HT.

If I were to go the antenna route, I'd quite obviously want a base station or mobile - curious what people would recommend that is metaphysically equivalent to the FT-60 in mobile/base station form, and, for now anyway, a dual band 2m/70cm transceiver. Something without a lot of bells and whistles but good quality.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (316:36/55)