AmateurRadio.com

Although I’m not a huge fan of chasing Dxpeditions these days, I still think it’s fascinating and magical to travel to a remote part of the planet, set up a radio station and be able to make contacts all over the world.

Nodir Tursoon-Zadeh EY8MM has produced several eBooks based on his photographs from various high profile Dxpeditions which are available for free.

If you are an iPad/iPhone user, simply go to the iBooks store and search for VP8ORK 2011 and you should be able to download and view the book, which makes excellent reading. Nodir has taken some wonderful photographs which really capture what it is like.

It looks like Nodir has published an eBook on the FT5ZM trip to Amsterdam Island, which is available in the Blurb store but I can’t see it in the iBooks store just yet. I suspect you can get it onto your iDevice from Blurb, but I haven’t tried that yet!

“Hey, Dad …… do you have a meter that will read really small voltages and tiny amounts of current?”, my son Joseph asked the other week.

“Joey, I’d better! I’m an Amateur Radio operator, and I was an electronics technician for 22 years.”, I replied.

And so began the 2014 8th grade Science Fair project. My son decided to see how the pH of a fruit or vegetable would affect its ability to generate electricity. His hypothesis – the more acidic the fruit/vegetable, the more power would be generated.

The materials were an apple, a lemon, a pear and a potato. A head of red cabbage was procured to act as a pH indicator. Zinc screws and 3 inch pieces of #10 gauge copper wire served as electrodes.

Before we began generating electricity, my wife boiled some leaves from the cabbage in a pot of water. The resulting liquid would act as our litmus paper.

I stuck a screw and a piece of the copper wire into each piece of produce. The positive lead from the meter went to the copper wire and the negative lead was attached to the zinc screw. We measured both voltage and current, to be able to calculate Watts.

A teaspoon of the cabbage water was put into four glasses. Juice from each piece of produce went into the purple cabbage water. If the cabbage water turned blue, it would indicate a base. If the water stayed purple, the pH would be neutral. An acidic pH would turn the cabbage juice pink.

From lowest output to highest were – potato, pear, apple, lemon.
And in turn, the potato had the lowest pH, while the lemon had the highest. The voltage and current readings followed the pH indications. It seems my son’s hypothesis was correct!

Now all Joey has to do is make a graph, print out the pictures we took and write up an explanation of what was observed. The really neat thing was that he had a good time and really enjoyed himself. I’m not sure what he wants to be, someday; but something in the scientific or electronics field would not be so bad.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

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The recording of AmateurLogic.TV episode 66 will be streamed live Saturday morning around 9:00 AM CDT, 1400 UTC (if I am awake). We will have the chat room up as well. Check back here for the links Saturday morning.

The live stream can be found here: Live Stream
The chat room is here: Chat Room

Tim, W3ATB and I took an extraordinary hike to Knox Mountain this afternoon. We walked along the brook enjoying the music and scenery of the spring day. I worked Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Tim worked Illinois and took some fantastic photos.

Barely a quarter of a mile from the pond we came around the corner and found a pile of rubble in the middle of the trail. “It’s a landslide!” said Tim right away. And it was. Tim estimates nearly 100 tons of the hillside (mostly clay) had slid down the hill… some of it reached the brook.

We crossed it easily, although we had mud covered shoes by the time we reached the other side.

It’s always a treat when the pond and cabin come into view after the hike.

The day was warm… perhaps 65F. The black flies have just started to appear, but they’re not biting yet. Tim tossed his line nearly 50 feet over the branch of the large cherry tree near the cabin. He pulled up a Par End Fed for 40 and 20 meters. I chose a smaller maple and used a 33 foot wire sloping toward the south. I was running the KX3 set up on 17 meters. Right away I worked IK2SND, Dan in Italy. Conditions weren’t great, but good enough for solid copy both ways. Meanwhile Tim was working K9MY, Jerald in Illinois with the HB-1B on 20 meters.

Next I worked ED5URL in Spain and CT7/RC2A in Portugal both on 17 meters. Then I switched to 15 meters and worked EA8NC, Manuel… again in Spain. I don’t think the propagation was very good because I didn’t hear many stations. And the ones I worked weren’t that strong.

Tim and I packed up and headed back down along the brook. It’s a day to be savored in memory. Blue skies, warm weather, a hike through some of the most beautiful country anywhere and some wonderful radio contacts… not just across the small pond at Knox Mountain… but across the Big Pond… all the way to another continent.

I just put HamRadioNow episode 143 on-line. It’s mostly a conversation I had yesterday with… Joe Ham. OK, really Joe Hamm KC1BAQ. Joe’s sort of a new ham, sort of a young ham. He’s 35, and a boomerang, having been licensed in college, but letting it go when it didn’t really ignite a spark.

So now he’s back. He’s a EE, so what attracted this young engineer back to ham radio? And what will keep him?