AmateurLogic 212: Christmas 2025

21 December 2025 | by George W5JDX | Leave a Comment (0)

AmateurLogic.TV Episode 212 is now available for download.

N5ZNO’ First POTA Activation. 2.5 Gbps Fiber to The Shack. New and Classic Christmas Fails.

The video is a “Christmas edition” of AmateurLogic.TV, featuring hosts George, Tommy, Emile, and Mike discussing various amateur radio-related topics and personal updates.

Here’s a summary of the key segments:

Introductions and Personal Updates (0:26-4:25): The hosts greet viewers for the Christmas episode. Tommy shares he’s on vacation until January 2nd and is enjoying more radio time (1:11-1:40). Emile discusses building his radio shack, including installing a fiberglass mast and planning internet connectivity (2:03-2:34). Mike talks about recent heavy snowfall and preparing for Christmas (2:53-3:22). George mentions being on vacation for the rest of the year (3:55-4:14).

AI’s Impact on Tech Prices (4:27-5:23): Mike shares a CNET article about how AI is driving up the prices of computer components, particularly RAM, reminiscent of past memory price spikes due to factory fires.

Tommy Gun Antenna Launcher (5:39-6:10): The hosts showcase the “Tommy Gun,” an antenna launcher designed to quickly deploy wire dipole or windom antennas using combustible ammunition like black powder or WD40.

N5ZNO’s First POTA Activation (6:18-13:50): Tommy (N5ZNO) recounts his first “Parks on the Air” (POTA) activation. He set up his MFJ 1898 antenna and Icom 705 radio in his truck due to cold weather, making 20 contacts in about 25 minutes. He also explains his paper logging process and how he uploaded his logs to QRZ.com and Parks on the Air (POTA) database (14:37-16:42).

FCC Allocates 60 Meter Worldwide Amateur Band (18:47-20:00): News is shared about the FCC allocating a new amateur radio spectrum in the 60-meter band for worldwide use on a secondary basis, approved at WRC15. This band is available to general class license holders and above, with a maximum bandwidth of 2.8 kHz.

Grandpa Rap (20:02-20:52): The hosts briefly play a “grandpa rap” song related to amateur radio, humorously suggesting they should stick to their day jobs.

2.5 Gbps Fiber to the Shack (21:04-35:10): Emile provides an update on his shack build, detailing his network upgrade to 2.5 Gbps internal LAN speeds with 10 Gbps fiber uplinks using Ubiquiti’s Flex 8 series switches (21:47-26:50). He also shows the internal wiring for power outlets and discusses plans for external lighting, security, and various antenna setups, including a 500ft sky loop antenna and a hitch mount for a 36-foot mast (27:00-34:50).

Christmas Fails Compilation (38:49-41:30): A compilation of humorous Christmas-themed fails.

Tim Tam Cookies (43:08-43:51): A brief mention of Tim Tams cookies, bringing back memories for the hosts.

Christmas Gift Ideas for YLs (43:54-50:00): A humorous segment where Emil suggests various Icom amateur radio equipment as “gifts” for spouses, often with comical misunderstandings of what the spouse might actually want. Mike presents some unique gift ideas.

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George Thomas, W5JDX, is co-host of AmateurLogic.TV, an original amateur radio video program hosted by George Thomas (W5JDX), Tommy Martin (N5ZNO), Peter Berrett (VK3PB), and Emile Diodene (KE5QKR). Contact him at [email protected].

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RAC Winter contest was a bust!!

20 December 2025 | by Mike VE9KK | Leave a Comment (0)

I was very disappointed, but I wanted to err on the side of caution. This weekend was the running of the RAC Winter contest, which is very well attended. I get a lot of practice running in this contest, and it is a great help in my contesting journey. Unfortunately, the weather forecast put a damper on the weekend contest. For our area, high winds were forecast up to 100 km/h along with rain that could turn into freezing rain. My antenna, the Hustler 4BTV, according to DX Engineering, is rated for winds up to 88 km/h. At the best of times, I don’t like to venture even close to that number with my antenna. This weekend it “could” reach 100 km/h, and then add to that the possibility of freezing rain. This weather event was to start on Friday and run until Saturday evening.

I have the ability to tilt the antenna down and secure it, which is what I did. Being retired now and on a fixed income, to replace the antenna would be about $600.00 with tax and shipping. I am not in a position to drop that kind of money because I decided to leave the antenna up and see what happens. Eventually, I would like to get the Butternut HF6V, as it can withstand winds up to 130 km/h. For the most part, other than a hurricane, I could leave it up without worry. At this point in time, that antenna is way out of our budget for a hobby.

The antenna will go back vertical on Sunday, and it lives for another day on the air, pushing out CW. It did give me more time on the weekend to spend working on my python coding projects for ham radio.

As a side note my participation in the contest would not had been as heavy as like in days gone by. We found out 2 weeks ago that my wife Julie has cancer. Things worked out great in that all with in a 2 week period she was able to see a specialist and then see a cancer surgeon and then have surgery as well. She had her operation on Wednesday and is now at home. We shall now see what the next steps are, but for now we are just enjoying Christmas.

Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

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RAC Winter contest was a bust!!

20 December 2025 | by Mike VE9KK | Leave a Comment (3)

I was very disappointed, but I wanted to err on the side of caution. This weekend was the running of the RAC Winter contest, which is very well attended. I get a lot of practice running in this contest, and it is a great help in my contesting journey. Unfortunately, the weather forecast put a damper on the weekend contest. For our area, high winds were forecast up to 100 km/h along with rain that could turn into freezing rain. My antenna, the Hustler 4BTV, according to DX Engineering, is rated for winds up to 88 km/h. At the best of times, I don’t like to venture even close to that number with my antenna. This weekend it “could” reach 100 km/h, and then add to that the possibility of freezing rain. This weather event was to start on Friday and run until Saturday evening.

I have the ability to tilt the antenna down and secure it, which is what I did. Being retired now and on a fixed income, to replace the antenna would be about $600.00 with tax and shipping. I am not in a position to drop that kind of money because I decided to leave the antenna up and see what happens. Eventually, I would like to get the Butternut HF6V, as it can withstand winds up to 130 km/h. For the most part, other than a hurricane, I could leave it up without worry. At this point in time, that antenna is way out of our budget for a hobby.

The antenna will go back vertical on Sunday, and it lives for another day on the air, pushing out CW. It did give me more time on the weekend to spend working on my python coding projects for ham radio.

As a side note my participation in the contest would not had been as heavy as like in days gone by. We found out 2 weeks ago that my wife Julie has cancer. Things worked out great in that all with in a 2 week period she was able to see a specialist and then see a cancer surgeon and then have surgery as well. She had her operation on Wednesday and is now at home. We shall now see what the next steps are, but for now we are just enjoying Christmas.

Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

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Loop on Ground (LoG) Receive Antenna

19 December 2025 | by Richard AA4OO | Leave a Comment (0)

Dirt Shark Antenna

How a Humble Wire on the Ground Can Transform Your Radio Listening

Ever find yourself locked in a frustrating battle, wrestling with all those fancy knobs and buttons on your shiny radio to bring a signal out of the noise, just to catch a faint whisper from that station that started out copyable? Or that elusive DX station is sending a call that you just can't copy because the SNR is like 3-6 dB. You're not alone. Our primary antennas often become indiscriminate collectors – drawing in not only the desired signals but also a relentless barrage of buzzing, static, and digital hash. In our increasingly noisy world, the conventional antenna, while a decent transmitter, can become a veritable noise vacuum.

My Noisy, Old-Faithful 80m OCF

My homebrew 80m OCF has been a very good antenna for me at my QTH. I replaced my 40m OCF with it over 10 years ago. Ice and wind have broken its supports a few times over the years but it has continued to be a good performer for me on all bands except 30m. I still get regular reports where the receiving station is hearing me better than I'm hearing them.

Even with all that praise, it always has been subject to noise. The balun is supported by a rope connected at the apex of my roof, so it is right up against my home. My house is full of electrically noisy stuff, the worst of which is a treadmill worthy of an all-band WW2 radio jammer and a HVAC that has a noisy blower and gas furnace igniter that wipes out 5kHz segments on 20m in regularly spaced sections. My neighbors have something that turns on and off and gives me a nice S8 noise in segments across 40m and 80m, usually happening after I've begun a QSO.

I enjoy a challenge as much as anyone but I realized I could do better. I wanted an antenna optimized for receive rather than transmit.

Receive Only Antennas?

While researching, I read about a number of receive only antennas.

Magnetic loops- Too fiddly to re-tune when you change bands
Beverage - Give me land, lots of land
LNA augmented, phased verticals - Money, money, money
Loop on Ground - Cheap, but they can't possibly work

Loop on Ground Antenna

Enter an unlikely Receive Only Antenna, known as the "Loop-on-Ground" (LoG). It’s a marvel of minimalist design – nothing more than a simple loop of insulated wire. Its genius, however, lies not in boosting signals, but in not hearing noise.

Think of the LoG as a more approachable, compact cousin to the venerable Beverage antenna. Harold Beverage's experiments in the 1920s, involving long wires hugging the ground, revealed the potential for noise rejection and clear signal reception that the LoG continues to explore.

So why would 60 feet of wire oriented as a square, fed at a corner, pressed into the ground and covered by your lawn make a good receive antenna? Haven't we always been told that antennas work better, the higher they are?

I'm no expert on this (or much of anything). The most useful information I found that demystified LoG antennas was on Matt Roberts KK5JY's website.

A Loop on Ground (LoG) antenna rejects noise by primarily responding to the magnetic field of radio waves, not the electric field, making it less sensitive to common electrical interference from household devices (like TVs, computers, power supplies) that create strong electric fields. Its low-to-the-ground placement also helps it "see" less local electrical noise, effectively acting as a directional antenna with deep nulls, especially when oriented away from noise sources, significantly improving the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for weak signals, according to KK5JY.Net.

How to Make One

The keys to the success of the antenna is making sure it is electrically isolated. Build a transformer using a binocular core with 5-6 turns (I used 6) of 30 AWG magnet wire connecting the wire and 2 turns going to the coax (instructions on KK5JY's site).

The coax thus becomes electrically isolated from the antenna. I forgot to take a picture before I sealed up the box with RTV but the photo above is from Bob's site. Stripping the enamel and soldering 30 AWG magnet wire is a challenge for me, especially in that small enclosure but I sorted it out. I filled my enclosure with RTV to secure the core and make it extremely difficult to work on in the future :)

I used 60 feet of my surplus, insulated telephone wire, bonded 2 stainless steel terminals to the ends and laid it out in the suggested pattern to align with my TX antenna. I have it placed about 25 feet away from my house in the back yard. It is about 50 feet away from my 80m OCF. It is secured using ground staples to hold the wire down into the grass. It literally disappears in the yard. I mean seriously disappears. I didn't have the transformer with me when I laid out the wire and stapled it, and when I came back out it took me 5 minutes to find the wire. You want to use a very small transformer enclosure so that it sits low in the ground so that your lawn mower won't destroy your hard work.

I used 75 feet of weather resistant RG6 75 ohm TV coax to get it back to my grounding point by the house where it goes into an arrestor before I use another 75 feet of coax to get it back up to my operating position.

I used coax seal on the connections both to the transformer and the arrestor.

Results

At my station I run it to my SDRPlay, using the SDR Antenna Switch and Front End protector I built 8 years ago.

I clearly see signals on the SDRUno display that don't even appear on my Yaesu FT-DX10 waterfall connected to the 80m OCF. The FT-DX10 has one of the best receivers in ham radio at this time, so it can dig those invisible signals out (barely) if I tune to what I see on the SDR, but if I switch to the audio from SDRUno they can be heard clearly.

Signals are being picked up by the LoG that are lost in the noise and are invisible on the waterfall of the FT-DX10 no matter how much I fiddle with the display gain and display peaking filters. But I can work them when I find them because that 80m OCF is a good performer as a TX antenna.

Similar to how I configured the SDRPlay to work with my Ten-Tec Eagle; SDRUno is feeding an IQ signal to CW Skimmer. CW Skimmer acts as my cluster server and my logging software shows me what I don't see on the Yaesu's waterfall. I click a station, either in CW Skimmer's display or from the cluster list and the FT-DX10 tunes to the station.

If I can't hear it on the DX10 it is a bit of a pain to turn off the IQ output from the SDR and send it's audio to a speaker rather than CW Skimmer, but I can work the station receiving on SDRUno and transmitting from the DX10.

Flipping the IQ on/off and changing the output is annoying so I have found a used DX-Engineering RTR-1A that I plan to put in series with the SDRPlay allowing the DX10 to listen on the LoG and transmit on the OCF, while protecting the SDR. I'll make a video showing the results when it arrives.

Conclusion

I had read mixed results from other hams on forums discussing using Loop on Ground antennas so my expectations were not super high. Maybe hams who aren't getting good results could try re-orienting their receive loops or maybe the transformer wiring could use improvements. Maybe they just don't have as much local noise as I do, but for my station this is a game changer.

While I've had mixed feelings about my DX10 I will admit that it hears and cleans up noise far better than my Ten-Tec Eagle and KX3 ever did, but I didn't know what I was missing. Since I had the waterfall on the DX10 I had stopped just slowly moving the VFO across the band. I would just tune to a signal I saw on the waterfall. I had no idea there was so much hiding in the noise.

"Now I see" said the blind man

That's all for now,

So lower your power and raise your expectations... Or build a receive only antenna and see what you were missing.

73 AA4OO

Richard Carpenter, AA4OO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from North Carolina, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

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LHS Episode #605: Year-End Roundtable 2025

18 December 2025 | by Russ K5TUX | Leave a Comment (0)

Hello and welcome to the 605th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this year-end episode, the hosts invite listeners and friends to join them as they talk about the year in review and cover multiple topics: AI, new gear, Linux distributions, security, 2026 predictions and much more. Thanks for listening and have a great holiday season. We'll see you again in 2026!

73 de The LHS Crew

Russ Woodman, K5TUX, co-hosts the Linux in the Ham Shack podcast which is available for download in both MP3 and OGG audio format. Contact him at [email protected].

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Top Five Blog Posts

Leading the list is this blog post…a perennial favorite that seems to make the top five each year. This particular article is tuned for Colorado, but also provides a link to an article covering the topic for the USA.

Choose Your 2m Frequency Wisely

In second place, this article from Sept 2022 popped onto the list. This post addresses some confusion about the common nomenclature of VHF and UHF.

What Do VHF and UHF Mean?

In the third spot, we have another older article about 2m SSB that just keeps on getting views. I recently updated this article, which was written a long time ago.

Getting Started on 2m SSB

Number four this year is a more recent article about the station I’ve been using for both SOTA and POTA activations, built around the Icom IC-705.

Improved IC-705 SOTA/POTA station

In fifth place is this article describing the RH770 antenna for use with dual-band 2m/70cm handheld radios.

A Better Antenna for Dualband Handhelds

However, there is a newer, better version of this antenna, which I just wrote about in September:

A New 2m/70cm Telescoping Antenna

Editors Choice

Just for good measure, I am including one more notable post. This explains why I strongly favor using VHF and UHF frequencies for SOTA activations. It is all about Height Above Average Terrain.

Height Above Average Terrain

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

73 Bob K0NR

The post Top Five K0NR Blog Posts for 2025 appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Bob Witte, KØNR, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Colorado, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

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ARRL 10m contest 2025

15 December 2025 | by Mike VE9KK | Leave a Comment (0)

Final score

Another ARRL 10m contest is in the books, and once again, I was surprised by how well 10m performed. The solar numbers were good—not great, but good. This meant there was fading in and out of signals. At one point, when I was calling CQ contest and a station came back to me, you had one chance to complete the contact, or they were gone for good.

Saturday was a great day with many long runs and high hourly contact rates. I just figured that Sunday would be a lot of the same… NOT. I found Sunday to be slower, with the average hourly run between 50 to 70 contacts. Toward Sunday late afternoon, it seemed I was calling CQ contest to empty space, and it was at this time I found my rate was better just searching and pouncing my way along the band.

It was nice again to contact fellow blogger Bas. He was just at the noise floor, but was readable and in the log. Oh, and thanks, Bas, for spotting me on the cluster—once I completed our contact, things started to get very busy for me. When this happens, I find narrowing my filter to 200Hz and turning up my CW speed from 32 to 36wpm has a way of thinning things out. Not as much in this contest, though, as my exchange is my Canadian Province, and it, in most cases, self-populates for most contacts. Once things slow down a bit, the filter goes back to 300Hz and the speed to 32wpm again.

From my location, I found 10m open at 8am to Europe, and I could hear them answering U.S. and Canadian calls, but I heard none of those stations until noon. At noon, it then turned into a mix of North America and Europe until early afternoon, when most of Europe faded away. Late afternoon it was still North America but now with some Central America and South America mixed in. Around 4pm local time, most, if not all, stations were gone, or the fading was so bad it was very frustrating to make a contact.

I know I’ve hit my limit, and it’s time for a break when I start to make silly mistakes. Case in point: I had a call from a fellow CWop, K4RUM, he is from NY, so my logging program prefilled that—BUT he sent FL. Not a problem; he’s enjoying some warm sunshine. Very simple to hit a few keys and change the state—I do it all the time. Well, not if you’re getting tired like me. I sent K4RUMNY as his call. Then I sent K4RUMFL as his call. I am now pounding foolish keyboard keys such as

“?” my province “NB” and well finally I sent K4RUM FL TU. He gave me two “dits” from his key with what I would imagine was a smile on his face.

I am now gearing up for the next big contest out this way: the RAC Winter contest on December 20. See you all there.

Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

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