All things ham radio. I received my license on 20090731 and intend on journaling my adventures in the ARS.
Calling CQ is still a weird thing for me. I mostly just spin the dial and hope to find someone else calling CQ; or even better someone calling CQ DX or CQ Contest. These are great because it’s a narrow set of conversational topics. You get an RST, you give an RST, you exchange QTH…
Was able to make two international contacts this evening and they couldn’t have been more different. First was a gentleman in Brasil who runs a veritable QSO factory. When he taps you on the head it’s call sign, name, and signal report. If he’s feeling particularly generous he’ll give you his nickname. Dude makes at…
Doubled the number of radials on the 43′ vertical out back and I think I’ve cut down the background noise from about a S6 to a S4.5. Quiet stations are now a bit easier to pick up. Speaking of which…QSO with Cuba! 20 meters is truly the magic band. Sending this QSL card is going…
I spent lunch today bouncing around area Post Offices until someone could definitively tell me that, while the USPS honors International Reply Coupons [1], they do not sell them [2]. So now sending a SASE to Omsk involves finding an online market for these products, knowing someone in a country with a postal service with…
It took about fifteen minutes of calling to get through but I finally made contact with UA9MA. Gena (short for Genaddij) had an incredible signal all across North America by the sounds of it. I captured the QSO although there it is obvious I need to do some tweaking of the audio in from my…
I was spinning around the 20 meter band this evening looking for entertainments and was not disappointed. The band is quirky this time of night (in my experience) and sometimes you find interesting signals. Radio Havana Cuba [1] broadcasts in AM on 14.295mHz which is right in the thick of the internationally designated 20 meter…
Currently hearing KC4AAC [1] on 18.110mHz. Can’t copy it well and the pileup is beyond my little 100 watts of reach. Still, wow, radio from Antarctica. [1] http://www.dx-world.net/kc4aac-palmer-station-antarctica/
Just knocked out my first ever set of QSL cards for the Route 66 On the Air stations I managed to contact. All told I hit 9 of 21 which isn’t awesome by any stretch of the imagination but it was my first HF experience. Anyway, I don’t think I’ve written that much in longhand…
I found the preppers’ net. Tuesday – Saturday at 0100UTC on 3.86000. Things that are going to bring down society in the near future: Ebola virus which is going to mutate to being communicable in airborne form The D86 virus making the rounds could mutate into something much more dangerous El Niño which is going…
So there is a bad ass solar flare [1] punking up the radio bands tonight. Everything is extra noisy and pulling in stations is proving difficult. Even so I found W6S (don’t forget Winona) on the 40 meter band and checked another station off the Route 66 On the Air event [2]. One benefit, I…