To the ham friend who recently complained at lunch sitting beside me over a plate of breakfast, that I am writing too much and it takes too long to read, I apologize in advance for yet another blog post. 🙂 Apparently I’m doing a good job of keeping you pinned in your seat, though! Electromagnetic …
Continue reading “Radial Wrangling for Cliff Dwellers and Other Antenna Voodoo”
“It’s addictive”, he said. Sim Syndrome Back in my younger days, when I played video games a whole lot more there was a very popular PC game called The SIMS. It’s still around, in some form, or many forms as there were a lot of add-on packs you could get. The point of this game …
Continue reading “Radio SIM Syndrome and a Huge Hole in the Sky”
I was on HF last night, working a little 40m FT8 when I occurred to me I might want to look at the radar overlay in Grid Tracker (One of the programs I run alongside WSJT-X for additional information about where my signals are going.) My neighbor and I had been chatting earlier in the …
Continue reading “Eye in the Sky – Storm Spotting Ida At a Safe Distance”
I’ve been at a bit of an impass on 40m lately. All of the states that it was easy for me to get I already have claimed towards Worked All States on that band, and while I can often hear a variety of juicy stations in the DX-Sphere, I just couldn’t hit most of them. …
Continue reading “2AM Tokyo Takeout (Holy Leaping Hams, Batman!)”
Every time I think I have the RFI problem ironed out, I move to another band, and have to chase it all over again. Sauntering my way over to 40m recently gave me a repeat of the RFI gremlins vexing my laptop, and thwarting my rig control and laptop USB communications, similar to the chase …
Different wavelengths of radio propagate much differently from each other and that means that some times of day are better for one band than another. Daytime Bands 20m is generally a daytime band, but dissolves into just noise as the sun goes down. You can watch your signals just stop going anywhere following the grayline …
Statistics can be a bunch of fun, as dry as that sounds. The more contacts I’ve made on digital HF modes, the more interesting the stats get which I can see in my QRZ logbook. I browse my logbook stats regularly not only to see what awards I can get certificates for, and to see …
Continue reading “Fun with Statistical Digging (Or all my X’s are Still in Texas)”
I admit that I was not sure how long that digital mode communications were going to be able to hold my interest after a few awards were achieved. The communications are very short and functional. Literally 14 or so characters per message. On FT8/FT4 It goes something like this ( With my translations =) ): …
Continue reading “Chasing Teapots, Lighthouses and other Special Event Stations”
Before the internet was woven into every aspect of our lives, a majority of amateur radio operators would send out little post card sized QSL cards– basically a confirmation of date, time, frequency, equipment used, and a thank you for a QSO. This was doable because a lot of contacts were on voice modes (so …
After a multi-day “foot chase” and hide and go seek of wily Alaska ham stations (meep meep!) I finally managed to run down and snag a “confirmer” this evening. Thank you NL7S for your completed QSO all the way to the final 73, and especially for uploading your log before my license expires in 2029 …
