Over the years you’ve heard me utter the phrase: “Get on air and make some noise!”. It’s not an idle thought. The intent behind it is to start, to do something, anything, and find yourself a place within the hobby of amateur radio and the community surrounding it....
Much is made in our hobby about working DX, that is sending and receiving distant radio signals. How distant is up for debate. Depending on where you are, DX might be outside the continent, outside the country, or in my case you could easily say, anything outside of my state, since the nearest border is about 1,240 km away from...
Some life lessons require additional reinforcement from time to time. This week I was strongly encouraged to remember a lesson that can be summarised as: “A place for everything and everything in its place.” It was first uttered like that to me a quarter of a century ago by a client who used it frequently around their staff....
In the early 1920’s long distance communication using radio was a growing interest. At the time it was thought that communication that we take for granted today, over long-distance HF, was limited to long wave or extremely low frequencies, the lower the better. With that restriction came massive antennas and high power...
After pulling my hair out for a bit and some wonderful support from jeffpc@mastodon.radio, I have now compiled hlog and hlog-contest, a console based logger that supports contests defined in #lua and published the result on GitHub for your enjoyment.
I’m wondering what you guys suggest to regain my interest in this hobby. I got my certification last fall (live in US) and was excited to learn the concepts and start using a radio. But after passing that my interest has dropped....
A great deal of energy is expended on the notion of operating portable. I’ve talked about this plenty of times. Issues like power, antennas, suitable radios, logging, transport and time of day all come to mind. Some activities are framed specifically as portable operations. Things like Summits On The Air, or SOTA, Parks On The...
I think about accepting the challenge and boldly solder SMD where I’ve never soldered before: Doing the Quansheng UV-K5 4732 addon PCB modification myself 🙈...
I have a small dilemma regarding logging a QSO, and I’m wondering if you can guide me through it. I made a contact the other day while doing POTA, but I did not capture the entire callsign. The error was only revealed after I saw their re-spot on the POTA site; if it weren’t for that small glimpse, I would never know, and...
I don’t know many hams nor do I chat with the same hams on a recurring basis, and my wife is only tangentially interested in radio inasmuch as it makes me happy, so I thought I’d be the life of the party and post about the best day on the air I’ve had yet. My aim is to share my enthusiasm with the world....
As the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, draws closer, a vibrant community of enthusiastic amateur radio operators, known as “hams,” is gearing up for an exciting project
If you’d like to catch up with the team who went on an epic DXpedition to activate Amsterdam Island using #FT5ZM in 2014, I’ve just uploaded the 26 interviews I did while they were using Perth as their staging point....
I was atop Stone Mountain in Georgia this past weekend hoping for a glorious POTA activation, dragged my spouse and kids who braved the early (for them) cold and wind and setup the 7300 only to make a single park-to-park contact… from inside the park....