Tech Tips

We are at the mercy of a multitude of noise sources in and around our ham shacks these days. I built myself a very useful tool for sniffing out noise sources a few years ago. I had bought a working battery powered Heathkit preamp for a few dollars at a hamfest and hadn’t really found […]

Now that we are nearly at the sunspot maximum, 10m is open nearly every day for US and DX contacts. The really cool thing is that US tech license holders can operate on this band with up to 200W on SSB from 28.3 to 28.5MHz. With the very minimum of set up a new tech

Recently I was talking to someone about a 3-D printed project I did for work. Michael, KI7LXY heard me talking about it and asked if I would like to take on a project for him. He has a Motorola CDM1250 radio that he uses as an AllStarLink simplex node at his house. During the Wednesday

Since moving to Fountain Hills, I’ve made regular use of my old 14AVQ vertical antenna. It works very well due to it being out in the open garden area away from trees and other obstructions. Unfortunately, it has no WARC bands. So just for fun I thought that I’d try adding additional ¼ wave vertical

In one of my amateur radio endeavors, I’m installing two repeaters in Forest Lakes on the Mogollon Rim in Northern Arizona. As part of this project, I needed to install two antennas on an existing 40-foot tower. While organizing this task, I reached out to Brent, W7FK, who kindly agreed to assist me. We scheduled

In amateur radio, we keep logs of our radio contacts as a part of our station records, and to enable sending of QSL cards via the postal mail or through an online service. We log time and date using the UTC time standard. We call it “Coordinated Universal Time” in English, but everyone around the