I have had some interest in experimenting with satellite radio. Typically you transmit on one band, receive on another. This can be done with two radios, but I wanted to keep things simpler and use one. I happened to find someone selling a Kenwood TM-V71a mobile radio for an attractive price. It’s a nice radio, but when I used it indoors, the fan was too loud for me to hear the speaker. The Ubiquitous Cooling Fan ...
My daughter graduated college and moved back home, necessitating a need for me moving my work area. After I set up my work desk and ham shack in the former dining room. Further completing the experience, I have the antenna running right out the back of the house up into a tree. I recently built a custom screen to fit in between the wood with antenna connections and the rest of the window. ...
General advice to get started on single call mode in Morse Runner (Ken Tucker, WF6F, Jim Carson, WT8P): Accuracy is more important than speed. Wait until the sending station is done transmitting before you respond. If you respond over him, immediately hit the escape key to stop. Scoring increases as you go along (see below). If you receive the call correctly, type in the call sign and hit enter. It will fill in the QSO sequence automatically. Listen for an “R,” followed by “599” and, finally, the sequence number. Type that sequence number in, hit enter, and the new one will come almost immediately. ...
There were scant formalized opportunities for field day this year as local clubs either didn’t have a formal program (Redmond) or weren’t actively open (Issaquah), so I joined my friend K7IP in Ocean Shores to mess around with radios and do some geocaching. We operated from the public beach south of town. (4WD very helpful for getting there.) K7IP (Doug) setting up the kite For the first morning, we used up a Kite antenna. The kite was tethered to his truck by string, which stands out a little better. The second line is 135′ of #12 magnet wire. We were originally going to feed this to my 9:1 balun, but tightening the screws sheared the wire. We added a long counterpoise and just ran it direct to the radio. ...
I’ve finished a month of QSOs and thought it’d be fun to look at the results. Early (5pm) in the evening, I can hear activity along the east coast, Mexico, and Cuba(!), but I am unable to get through. Not surprisingly, most of my contacts have been between 7pm and 10pm (02 – 05 UTC), when the sun’s dropping and signal propagation is improved. Contacts by band and time of day. ...