AmateurRadio.com

For some time, I have admired and loved AM radio. I worked at an AM broadcast station for 12 years. So I fell in love with that full sound. It has always appealed to me. And there are other out there who enjoy that too. And if you have ever wanted to be a part of that world, you can be. There is even a website for people who love AM as well as home brewing radios.

Screen Shot of AMFone.net

I have been a lurker on AMFone.net for a while. I originally found it through the AM Window website. It has articles and files on how to get a top notch AM station on the air and sounding good. You can also have a look at the classifieds on the website to find equipment to supplement your existing AM station to to find that right receiver or transmitter to get your station started. There is even an area for restoration of old radios as well.

And not to leave out the folks who like new radios, there is also a section for modern rigs. Tips and modifications to get that modern solid state radio to be top notch on AM. And if you’re like me and want to just learn more in general about Ham Radio from a more technical side, this is an awesome site to do it from as well. Reading and asking questions is how to learn. And one of the things I have found on this site is a lack of old farts telling you “How it should be done”. Instead, I have found helpful people willing to share their knowledge.

Definitely check out this website if AM has been a mode you have been curious about. It’s well worth the look and you’ll be happy you did.

73.

Rich also writes a Tech blog and posts stories every Tuesday and Thursday on Q103, The Rock of Albany’s website, as well as Amateur Radio stories every Monday thru Friday here on AmiZed Studios.

[amazon_enhanced asin=”B000P0O12I” /]

Just a few days ago the IKEA store opened here in the local Denver area.  We’ve been hearing about IKEA coming to Colorado for the past 4-5 years.  Just a little over a year ago, IKEA broke ground on their new site just south of my QTH in Centennial, Colorado.  The grand opening certainly wasn’t without fanfare and my wife was looking forward to visiting the new store. 

The local news sources (TV, radio and newspaper) had all been talking about the number of people lining up and even camping out for several days before the official opening.  I avoid most crowded situations like the plague and this was certainly no exception. 

Since the grand opening was Wednesday, I really figured the weekend crowd (Saturday and Sunday) would also be busy, so we decided to go on Friday and make an evening of it.  Our IKEA has a restaurant specializing in Swedish meatballs.  Yum Yum

Anyway, I gladly accepted my role of driver and bag carrier.  We arrived just after 6 PM and the city/county officials had done a great job with traffic management.  Once on the IKEA property we were directed to the underground parking garage and found a parking spot with ease.  A few minutes later we were riding up the escalators to the upper level of the store.

While my wife had a few items on her shopping list, I really went with no expectations I would find anything I wanted, much less needed.  But I enthusiastically walked around looking interested in all the stuff IKEA sells.  Now before you get the wrong impression, I do enjoy shopping and it’s made even better when my best friend, my wife is with me.  Yes, I’ll be the first to admit I know where all the “man chairs” are located in the mall shops, but I do enjoy shopping.

We covered the two levels of IKEA and I had not really found anything that interested me personally.  I looked at the office chairs but my wonderful wife had purchased me a great chair last year and it still looks as good as new.  We passed by some of those white, cardboard magazine boxes.  I did grab a pack of 5 for about 3 bucks I think.  I need something to better organize QST, CQ and RADCOM magazines. 

A few minutes later I found something that caught my eye.  It was a LED table lamp on an adjustable arm.  It puts out practically no heat and I can bend the light around and focus it just where I need it.  The wife saw me looking at them and she said “for the soldering projects”?  I said yes and then some. 

The light has a heavy base (around 2lbs) and comes with a 6 foot cord.  This lamp will work great with my “soldering projects”, but also with other things where I just need to get more light onto the subject.  The light cost me $12.99 and can be found here on the IKEA website.

It didn’t take me long to put it to good use.  Here you can see it being used on an old radio project I’ve been working off and on (mostly off).  I’m currently re-stringing the dial cord on an old Belmont AM radio my wife gave me for Christmas a few years ago.  The radio needed a new dial cover, dial string and dial light.  I have all the parts and just getting it all assembled again. 

But yes, the IKEA light will also come in handy for soldering projects and other things around the shack.  I often dim the lights when operating (especially at night) and this will be great just to the side of my shack desk.

So I guess even a radio ham can find things of interest in IKEA.  It’ll probably be a few weeks before we venture into IKEA again.  I will probably pickup another of these lights and I already need some more magazine boxes.  Who knows, maybe I’ll find a few other things I can’t live without next time. 

Until next time…

73 de KD0BIK

Hello fellow amateurs,

Sorry for the long delay between blog postings.  The last update was a Merry Christmas message and before that it was Happy Thanksgiving.  I’ve had some recent ham radio activity and plan to get the blog going again with those activities in the next few days.  So for now I’m just using this posting to test the RSS feeds, knock the cobwebs down from the site and say hello to all my fellow ham friends.

73,
Jerry
KD0BIK

This is part 2 of the series, click here to read part 1 

It’s been another crazy week at work and at home and I’d hoped to have another entry or two posted by now, but I just haven’t had the time. I’ve finally found a few minutes, so I’d like to focus on things from a DX perspective and talk a bit about QSLing.

As I’ve previously noted, the weather kept the total number of contacts far lower than I’d hoped, with the total number of contacts ending up at 87 for the week (including one duplicate who I helped out with an antenna check). It looks like I worked 22 different countries though I believe that one of those will be a busted call: I logged a caller with a “DX” prefix which would correspond to the Philippines but at the time I was working into Europe and I suspect that it’s actually a “DL” call. In terms of “best DX”, I worked into European Russia (UA) and Ukraine (UT) a few times, with the majority of the countries being in central Europe such as Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, and others in that area. I worked relatively few US states, though I don’t have good statistics on the because I didn’t get the state from all the operators that I worked. Most of the stateside contacts tended to be in the US Southwest although I did work up into Virginia and farther up the US East Coast for a few contacts.

As I mentioned in my last post, I did manage to get a full-blown pileup going a few times, and I can really understand how addicting this can be. I’d love to be able to operate from a “real” DXpedition, or even from a “primarily radio” vacation somewhere, but for now my vacation time is limited so I tend to squeeze in radio when I can. I hope that at some point over the next year or two I can get creative and find time away for a “radio” vacation.

Regarding QSLing, I got a question this week from a station asking me about whether the contacts would be uploaded to Logbook of The World. As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of LoTW, and would love to make the contacts available there. However, I’m having some issues getting a LoTW certificate issued and it’s not clear when (or if) that issue will be resolved. (This only applies to my operating from TI7.) In the meantime, if you need a card, please QSL via my home call the “old fashioned” way with a paper card. Because of the relatively few contacts made, I’m not going to have a bunch of card commercially printed but I will design and print a card specifically for this operation. My QSL information is always kept up to date at my entry on qrz.com.

If you want to check to see if you’re in my TI7 log, I’ve uploaded that to the Clublog website which you can search here. If you think you worked me and you can’t find your entry in the online log, please drop me a note and I’ll check for you as it’s entirely possible that I busted a call or two.

When I’m out and about mobile, I generally have at least one VFO scanning about 40 channels on 2m and 70cm. The 2m FM calling frequency (145.500) is one. But generally, I seem to end up making QSOs via the repeaters. This works well and I have lots of fun and interesting contacts.

This weekend I decided to leave one of the VFOs on 145.500 and make lots of CQ calls! It yielded a couple of decent contacts. Yesterday, from one of the lanes around the village, I worked a SOTA station M0TUB/P on the summit of Cleeve Hill near Cheltenham. And today, when I was driving back from Mum’s near Cheltenham, I had an excellent QSO with Giles G0NXA across the town and up and over the Cotswold escarpment. I wonder if a few CQs on 145.500 on the daily commute will bear any fruit?

The VHF Es season seemed to kick off early this year in mid April. So here we are at the end of July and it seems to have been going for a while. Sadly, it generally starts to tail off a bit now – normally.

The new V2000 aerial has proved a great success for single hop Es on 50MHz and I have two to three hundred QSOs in the log. 70MHz has been more sparse. I think I have probably spent too much time on 50MHz at the expense of 70MHz. And for me, 144MHZ has been a wipeout, with nothing heard or worked. But that’s just a case of not being there at the right time.

The Anytone AT-5555 has proved a lot of fun on 28MHz with a good number of low power QSOs around Europe on Es. With the exception of very low power WSPR operation, this has been my most rewarding HF operation in a couple of years!

Series Four Episode Sixteen of the ICQ Podcast has been released. News Stories include :-

• New Zealand's first radio station ZLW 100 years old
• RSGB Amateur Radio survey results
• Ofcom licensing error 
• Codar radar on 24 MHz
• Amateur Radio exams falling 
• 2 metre simplex frequencies loss imminent in Texas 
• Radio ham killed in tower accident 
• Ham radio saves man’s life 
• SJ22S World Scout Jamboree 
• The Republic of South Sudan now a DXCC Entity 
• 5 MHz in Slovakia
• 500 kHz and 70 MHz in the Netherlands 
• Brazil's first Amateur Radio satellite

Your feedback and Martin (M1MRB) and Colin (M6BOY) interview Richard (5B4AJG / M1EAR) and Baz (5B4AHO / M5BAZ) about being Amateur / Ham Radio operators in Cyprus.