Colorado Governor signs Amateur Radio antenna bill into law
Friday the 13th turned out to be a lucky day for Colorado hams, as Gov John Hickenlooper signed into law an Amateur Radio antenna bill that mirrors the PRB-1 federal pre-emption policy.
ARRL

The tallest towers in the world
Name the tallest structures in the world. You’re almost certainly not thinking of TV towers. But dozens of nearly anonymous towers around the United States, most in small rural communities, dwarf all but the tallest man-made structures in the world.
Medium

Strongest geomagnetic storm of Solar Cycle 24
It didn’t take long for the VHF bands to start filling up with auroral signals as 6m diehards soon discovered that something was amiss.
VE7SL

Ubuntu Hams
The Ubuntu Hams Team exists to bring together Amateur Radio Operators and developers of Amateur Radio packages who use Ubuntu.
Ubuntu

Why you should learn to love Ham Radio
When I joined as a squeaky-voiced 12-year-old in the 1990s, it was like discovering the Internet before the Internet.
PopularMechanics

TNC-Pi: TNC-X for Raspberry Pi
TNC-Pi is a special version of TNC-X designed to interface directly with the Raspberry Pi computer. It can connect to the Pi either via the Pi’s serial port, or via the I2C protocol.
TNC-Pi

FUNcube team has received two million packets of telemetry data
FUNcube-1 (AO-73) was launched on November 21, 2013 and since then radio amateurs and schools have been receiving the telemetry packets and passing them to AMSAT UK.
AMSAT UK

Minimalist VHF Software Defined Radio
Our next step will be to mix this signal to VHF and add a PA to produce 1 Watt of signal on 2M, to support our VHF FreeDV work. Please contact us if you can help us with a VHF PA design!
Rowetel

Video

1st contact as a licensed Ham made via satellite
There probably are not any other 8 year olds who can claim that!
Vimeo

Tower demolition
This video features the demolition of a 300′ cable head end tower in Jackson, MN. Built in 1953, it did not want to fall over.
YouTube

New products

RUMlogNG now available
RUMlogNG is the next-generation of Thomas’ (DL2RUM) excellent RUMlog logging software and incorporates logging, rig control, Winkey support, DX Cluster, LoTW/eQSL/Clublog, support for HamQTH or QRZ.com XML lookups, award tracking, QSL printing, integration with Fldigi for digital modes, and much more.
Mac Ham Radio

CQmaps: Professional maps for Amateur Radio
At CQmaps, you will find that all the maps offered have been drafted with the utmost care and precision gained from 10 years of experience as a Geographic Information System (GIS) Analyst and cartographer.
CQmaps

Reviews

Baofeng FF-12P (UV-5X)
A clip on YouTube suggested that the UV-5X / FF12P scans faster. This proves to be true: the FF-12P outperforms all other Baofeng radios I own, including the GT-3 Mark II. Scan speed is about 5-6 channels/sec.
PD0AC

SSTRAN AMT3000 AM transmitter kit
The AMT3000 can be configured to work with the supplied simple wire antenna, which will essentially broadcast AM to radios throughout your home, or it can be configured for a Part 15 compliant outdoor base-loaded vertical antenna which will extend your range up to 3/4 of a mile, should your shack be down the road or in an outbuilding.
The SWLing Post

Motion sensing using the doppler effect
In order to measure the doppler effect for motion detection on a conventional computer, what you can do is send out a sinusoid at some known (inaudible) frequency, say, 20 kHz.
Daniel Rapp

Hidden CW in Tubular Bells recording
This was caused by a powerful VLF station located next to the recording studio, which interfered with the recording equipment. Because the signal is very weak nobody ever noticed it — until now.
PD0AC

FreeDV and Codec 2 2015 Road Map
VHF FreeDV mode(s) that demonstrates a TDMA repeater in a 5kHz channel, diversity reception, high bit rate audio/data, and operation at 10dB less C/No than analog FM or 1st generation DV systems.
Rowetel

FCC Enforcement Bureau field resources poised to shrink
The Bureau plans to ask the full Commission to cut two-thirds of its field offices and eliminate nearly one-half of its field agents.
ARRL

Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network
The AREDN project mission is to provide the Amateur Radio community with a quality solution for supporting the needs of high speed data in the Amateur Radio emergency communications field.
AREDN

Activation of North Korea
3Z9DX explains he has received a further letter from authorities in Pyongyang inviting him to a final meeting to discuss [and for he to accept] rules by the North Korean military and the relevant telecommunications department.
DX World

X-class solar flare causes radio blackout
Good news? There may be some HF band openings in the wake of this flare.
The SWLing Post

Single Sideband on 2 Meters: The other VHF mode
Using SSB instead of FM can be equivalent to having a beam antenna with 10 dB of gain, just by changing modulation types.
Ham Radio School

SOTA Mountain Goat award
After 2 years and 2 days my point total is now 1,007, hallelujah!
AD5A

Fldigi ported to Android
The multimode digital software package that many have used for years on the desktop, has now been ported to Android.
AmateurRadio.com

20-year-old military satellite explodes in orbit
A 20-year-old military weather satellite apparently exploded in orbit Feb. 3 following what the U.S. Air Force described as a sudden temperature spike.
SpaceNews

Video

Short video of K1N expedition
YouTube

US Amateur Radio numbers reach an all-time high
Amateur Radio growth in the US continues to soar. The trend has continued in the first 2 months of 2015, which saw the ham population rise to slightly more than 727,000.
ARRL

HF digital voice without the computer
The first batch of SM1000s are being built in China right now and we estimate shipping will start in late March.
David Rowe (VK5DGR)

Amateur Radio Parity Act of 2015 introduced in Congress
The measure would direct the FCC to extend its rules relating to reasonable accommodation of Amateur Service communications to private land use restrictions.
ARRL

Global 24 Radio on the rocks
Four months in, Global 24 is offering to refund money to supporters (maybe).
Global 24

A Photo Tour of the National Capital Radio and Television Museum
Museum Curator and volunteer, Brian Belanger, kindly gave me a private tour of the museum collections.
The SWLing Post

K3 Memory Manager for OSX
K3 Memory Manager allows the user to read/write/edit/erase memories from any slot in the K3/KX3, including setting split frequency/modes. It uses a basic table format which is simple to understand and quite intuitive to use.
Mac Ham Radio

WX Warning Program
WXWarn is easy to use free weather software that will monitor National Weather Service warnings, watches, forecasts, etc., and alert you (audio and visually) as new ones are issued.
WXSpots

How to

An idiots guide to programming your Baofeng UV-5R radio
I don’t need no “stinking” programming cable.
W7DTG

Tips on buying a used paddle
The contacts may be dirty and need to be cleaned, but make sure that no one has taken a file to them.
KB6NU

Understanding Single Sideband (SSB)
Single sideband is a special form of amplitude modulation (AM). What’s so ‘special’ about it? Besides just encoding voice information with variations in signal amplitude, or power, SSB consumes a little less than half the bandwidth of a full “double band” AM signal.
Ham Radio School

Video

HackRF on Sky Loop Antenna and Talented Balun
In this video I put up a 20 meter band Delta Sky Loop Antenna with lighting arrestor to use with my HackRF One software defined radio.
ToddFun.com

Interview with David Rowe (VK5DGR) creator of CODEC2 (digital voice on HF)
“This will be the year” for digital voice to explode in Ham Radio.
HamRadioNow

Making a Full Bridge Rectifier
A full bridge rectifier is one of the main building blocks of AC to DC converters.
Mehdi Sadaghdar

Yaesu System Fusion Introduction
GigaParts

Verizon issues furious response to FCC, in Morse code
Verizon wrote a press release in Morse code and set the date as “1934” to make the point that the FCC is taking us backward in time.
Ars Technica

No one in the shack as station logs 4200+ contacts in DX CW contest
The group of six operators operating as K3TN in the recent ARRL International DX Contest (CW) may have made Amateur Radio history by mounting the first completely remote-controlled multioperator contest effort.
ARRL

K1N interviewed by Mediterraneo DX Club
When you listened to us working North America, we could cruise right along at 300-350 Q’s/hour. When working Europe, we would be extremely lucky to see rates of 125 Q’s/hour.
Mediterraneo DX Club

Mobilinkd Bluetooth APRS TNC
With your radio, your Android phone and this TNC, you have everything you need to get started with APRS.
mobilinkd.com

QRadioPredict
QRadioPredict is experimental software for VHF-UHF propagation prediction and radio coverage analysis.
YO8RZZ

K1N’s final press release
The DX world is very complimentary of our results… 140,000 QSOs and over 30,000 uniques.
Southgate

Amateur Radio club “takes over” shortwave channel
When German national broadcaster the Deutsche Welle closed down a 500 kW shortwave broadcast transmitter near Munich, an entity headed and operated by hams applied for and was granted the vacant channel of 6070 kHz.
ARRL

NASA ringtones
Here’s a collection of NASA sounds from historic spaceflights and current missions. We have included both MP3 and M4R (iPhone) sound files to download.
NASA

How to

Field Day info “Dashboard” using N1MM Logger
The intent is to connect a computer or i-device to an HDTV and have a browser running full-screen showing current progress.
KN4QD

Minimalist VHF Software Defined Radio
I think the future of radio hardware is a piece of wire connected to a GPIO pin. The rest of the radio will be “gcc compilable” free software running on commodity CPU horsepower.
ROWETEL

Ford F-150 Ham Radio installation
After acquiring a Ford F-150 truck last year, I’ve been working on getting a ham radio installed in it. I used a Yaesu FT-8900 that does FM on 10m, 6m, 2m and 70cm.
AmateurRadio.com

Video

WRTC 2014 Documentary
World Radio Team Championship documentary.
WRTC

ISS SSTV in a Brazilian School
Paulo (PV8DX) turned the recent Slow Scan TV transmissions from the International Space Station (ISS) into an education outreach opportunity for amateur radio.
AMSAT UK