Archive

I had a “free” day yesterday as most of the regular chores had been finished over the weekend. The weather was beautiful though rain is expected to move in today. That should give me another free day, but I have some AMSAT business to complete. I haven’t mentioned it...

Good morning, and Happy Earth Day. Linkage There were lots of QSO Parties this weekend and I managed to avoid them all. Looks like AO-109 has gone suborbital. I like crystal radios and I cannot lie. If every day was Christmas, we’d all get sick of it....

Ham radio is an activity that’s been around for over a hundred years and boasts a few million adherents around the world. It should come as no surprise that an institution so ancient and so compelling would harbor a few mysteries. During the early development of radio the activity was...

Maybe today is a good one to fill your gasoline tanks? War in the Middle East rarely goes unnoticed by oil companies and their minions… Morning. Windows open. Birds singing. Sun shining. Happy dance in my heart and a steaming cup of Joe in my hand. Does it get better?...

Taking this opportunity to offer a universal “bless you” to everyone dealing with allergies right now… What happens when we’re ALL old? The Financial Times recently reported that Japan’s number of over-65s is at a record-high 29%, while the amount of under-15s is at a record-low 11%. The country’s native...

The rain continues and the big story in this area is local flooding which is pretty typical for this time of year. I haven’t seen any neighbors building an ark, yet, but the ground is totally saturated and not accepting more moisture. Watching the rain pour out of the gutters...

My children and grandchildren were present for the Solar Eclipse on Monday. All I can say is “Wow!” Witnessing totality was an incredible experience that has changed my life. I only hope those radio amateurs who were busy collecting data and playing eclipse radio took time to be eye witnesses...

The ARRL’s Logbook of The World program began in 2003. Yeah. That long ago. I know, hard to believe, but more than twenty years have passed and the program has slowly grown in popularity. Having moved (QTH) more than a dozen times up to that point, I was tired of...

Dave, AA7EE does many amazing things with radio and recently wrote about a new project in his continuing low-power life adventure. I found his construction of an attentuator capable of throttling small levels of RF to be tantalizing. You know it’s good when you read about a project and...

End of Retro Cool QRP - If you’ve wanted one of those retro looking TR-45 low-power CW transceivers, in regular or skinny format, you may have missed the boat. WA3RNC is retiring: “I have been considering for some time the future of the Penntek Instruments amateur...

A stranger walked up to me at the Dayton Hamvention® a few years ago, asked if I was KE9V, and when I told him I was, he handed me a few sheets of paper and disappeared quickly into the crowd. This story was written on those pages… I was licensed...

I just mentioned needing one more state, Vermont, to seal the deal on Worked All States as a POTA hunter when this showed up: No, I didn’t work VT. I hadn’t previously noticed this footnote, “Hunt a park in 50 states...

I worked Eric, K7EVM who was activating US-3231 in Washington State on Tuesday, my 49th US state worked in the POTA program. This wasn’t accomplished by careful searching and pouncing, I just work what I can work and after awhile, it adds up. At this point I have made...

Brian, KB9BVN posted this question on the QRPARCI mailing list yesterday. QRP operation for QRP ARCI purposes is defined as operation with a transmitter power output equal to or less than 10 W PEP output for single-sideband or double-sideband phone (suppressed or full-carrier) and equal to or less...

Leo Bodnar Electronics recently updated the LBE-1420, a GPS-locked frequency clock source. NMEA data output is supported natively on Windows 10 and 11, Linux and macOS. We have added NMEA data output to our new LBE-1420 GPS locked clock source. It is...

My ongoing war with the cemetery where my Mom and Dad (along with various other relatives) were buried has come to an end. My Dad bought graves there more than 20 years ago. Headstones too. Everything. Bought and paid for. But since both were still living at that time their...

I recently uploaded the Cornbread Road audio series to the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications. DLARC is a project of the Internet Archive (the not-for-profit online library best known for The Wayback Machine.) DLARC is growing into a massive online library of the past and present of...

Living in isolation on a lonely mountain while the rest of the planet went to hell Clinton thought he had it pretty good. Sure, he longed for life the way it used to be. Dinners with colleagues, late night drinks at a cozy bar with old friends, the aroma of...

The visit to town went better than expected. At least from an execution standpoint. His route from the wilderness to “civilization”, such as it was, included several twists and turns that were probably unnecessary. He was trying to mask the direction he was coming from, but no one seemed to...

The late afternoon shadows were growing longer and the nights were a little cooler, clear evidence that autumn was just around the corner. Clinton wasn’t looking forward to winter weather again, though it did come with the implied luxury of refrigeration. He hadn’t taken any venison since he moved into...

Some weeks later the radio traffic began to grow and it was now possible to work several different stations along the east coast each day. The buzz was that power had been restored to many areas though there were reports of scheduled, rolling blackouts. In Raleigh, the power would be...

Ninety days had passed since the world changed forever. Life for Clinton had fallen into a routine, though not a normal one. He spent time every few days hunting or fishing, but mostly fishing now that the weather had turned warmer. He was also spending considerable time foraging for growing...

After stopping by his house to pack a few things, Clinton set out for the long hike up to Boone. It was late enough in the day he decided to follow highway 19 which would be a little tougher hike, but it was off the beaten path and a bit...

Twenty-four hours after the event some information was beginning to be received. The event over Carolina had indeed been some sort of magnetic pulse as assumed, though its origin and method of delivery remained a mystery. Washington, DC was hit. Hard. Probably nuclear, but that was only speculation and not...

When Clinton walked onto the campus he hoped everything would be normal here and the power outage just an isolated event. But he noticed the large water fountain in front of the administration building wasn’t running as he walked past it. A bad sign. There were cars in the parking...

This day began as most others. The alarm went off at 6:15am. Clint rolled out of bed and hit the shower. At 6:20am the coffee maker started to brew what had been setup the night before. Thirty minutes later the professor was shaved, dressed, munching on a bagel, and filling...

In the next several posts, I want to explore the feasibility for radio communication during an actual SHTF situation. I’m not talking about a tornado or hurricane event. Ham radio operators are already well-equipped to help out in those kinds of transitory situations and newspaper headlines point this out daily....

UPS delivered my new M3 MacBook Air last evening in the rain. I used the Migration Assistant app to transfer everything from my older (2020 M1) MBA via wireless connection, a process that took about two hours. That completed, the next step is prepping the old laptop for...

This Clock Made Power Grids Possible - the clock’s motors kept electricity at a steady 60 cycles per second. On 23 October 1916, an engineer named Henry E. Warren quietly revolutionized power transmission by installing an electric clock in the L Street generating station of Boston’s Edison Electric Illuminating...

I ordered a couple of the new KiwiSDR 2 yesterday. They had nearly exhausted the 2nd production run and will soon begin a 3rd production run. This second generation SDR is being manufactured in New Zealand (instead of China) and I have no clue (yet) how long it will...

This. This. MUCH MORE OF THIS! Dan White, AD0CQ, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Valparaiso (IN) University and an ARISS-US Education Committee member, earned the Michael V. Carano Teacher Excellence Award from the IPC Education Foundation, an arm of IPC, an international electronics manufacturing...

I’ve been evaluating my collection of HF transceivers as I consider thinning the herd. The only thing that has held me back to this point is life experience. I’d rather have a root canal than sell ham radio equipment. Especially complex gear. Most buyers want something for nothing and then...

I’ve held off writing about the passing of Bob Heil until now. We weren’t close friends, I only met him in person once, at the 2018 OzarkCon in Branson, Missouri. He was the keynote speaker at the conference and proud as he could be to show off his wooden radio...

One of the interesting aspects of our hobby is that with few exceptions (ATV, DATV, etc.) operators work others with no visual clues about the person on the other end of a contact except what has been proffered (by ourselves) online. In other words, I wouldn’t have a clue about...

I’ve read that total solar eclipses occur somewhere on Earth every 18 months on average, but they only recur at any given place once every 360 to 410 years. People are infatuated with this experience and enthusiasts often travel far and wide around the planet to be part of...

Sensory Stimulation Detoxifies the Alzheimer’s Brain - 40-Hz sound and light oscillations activate the brain’s waste-disposal function. Niklaus Wirth, Visionary Software Architect, Dies at 89 - Pascal, the programming language he created in the early days of personal computing, offered a simpler alternative to other languages in use...

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over QST magazine’s transition from print to digital format as an ARRL cost-cutting measure. As a Life Member who has an option, I’m ready to go all digital. I write this with the printed edition of the latest QST on the...

Someone queried the QRP-L mailing list this week about sources for RG-174 A/U custom jumpers. "I'm looking for reliable ham vendors who sell pre-assembled RG-174 A/U jumpers with a choice of connectors and length" Replies to date: I think DX Engineering will do jumpers like that by the...

The recent ATT service outage made headlines and datelines and had a lot of radio amateurs (who should know better) gloating and whipping out the tired “when all else fails” card. Turned out, the outage was brief, and mostly a nothingburger. Tech industry journalist Joanna Stern writing for her...

Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke...

My friend Steve, N8GNJ and the editor of the Zero Retries Newsletter has been pitching ideas lately about how to grow the amateur service. It’s admirable and ambitious, but I generally avoid this issue because a) I have no viable solution to offer, and b) I don’t believe anyone...

Lunar Landing. A private lander touched down on the moon Thursday but managed just a weak signal back, as flight controllers scrambled to gain better contact with the first U.S. spacecraft to reach the lunar surface in more than 50 years. AMSAT-DL receiving telemetry from moon lander...

Passing the various feed lines and rotor cables into the shack presents an interesting engineering challenge. Easy is usually cheesy and in this case, I don’t even know how many cables will eventually be required. The last thing I want to do is start cutting holes in the side of...

AMSAT-UK recently announced two additional amateur radio satellites that will be launched from the SaxaVord UK Spaceport later this year. Those are in addition to three others that had been previously identified. The announcement includes specific details on the individual satellites and their payloads. According to Wikipedia: SaxaVord...

One of the first orders of business has been getting the IC-9700 back on the air. The transceiver has been on the shelf since last summer when we moved. It anchors my satellite station which includes the M2 LEO-Pack antennas, a G-5500 azimuth and elevation rotor, and an...

Today is my 65th birthday. It’s a major milestone given that not everyone makes it this far in the journey of life. I’m grateful to still be kicking of course, and will celebrate the occasion quietly, with family. No ticker-tape parade or tearful inebriated sessions wondering “where did my life...