AmateurRadio.com

The ARRL 10-meter (28-MHz) contest was a couple of weeks ago.  Given that I had bothered to install a 10-meter antenna at this QTH and that conditions seem to be improving, I thought it would be fun to play.

I fired up CQing on Saturday and after a few minutes, Sarah appeared at the shack doorway.  This usually means that something is broken or I’m causing RFI to something she wants to be using.  Since I’m not KT0R, who used to tell his neighbors that he was “busy and please come back on Monday,” I obliged her.  It was the CO detector again.  I unplugged it (it’s battery-backed, so it just means that contesting burns through 9-volt batteries) and returned to the game.  Peace reigned again in the Miller household.

Sneaking in a little bit of contesting before church on Sunday morning is a long-standing habit of mine, although it seems that the Sunday openings are usually better than the Saturday openings.  Today was no exception.  I was working hard to extract a few QSOs out of what appeared to be a mostly dead band and Sarah again showed up at the shack doorway—this time with wet hair and quite agitated.

“The outlet is popping when I plug the hair-dryer into it!”

I assured her that I would take care of it, adding that it was “probably just the radio getting into the GFI.  Let me send a few dits and see if it starts clicking.”

“No, you stay there, I’ll send the dits.  How do you do it?”

“Just press the left paddle.”

And so, Sarah made her first ham radio transmission on 10-meter CW this morning (after which I did identify, for the record).  I confirmed that the outlet made a little click.  She was not completely convinced, but I told her I would shut down while she dried her hair so I could monitor the situation.

The hairdryer (a prior unit), Sarah, and I have had run-ins before.  Several years ago, when we were poor graduate students, a loose screw was causing a nasty vibration in the old hairdryer.  So, I tightened it up and gave it back to her, not knowing that there was another screw floating around inside the case.  One morning, that screw found its way into the motor and sparked.  When Sarah called me on the phone, I thought she’d burnt the house down.  As much as it pains me, I no longer attempt to fix any appliances that cost less than $50 as a result of this episode.

Still worked up, Sarah took the opportunity to grill me about the compatibility of contesting with family life…”When have children, how will you hear them if they’re in trouble and you have your headphones on?  (In jest, I later proposed wiring a baby monitor into the SOnR audio chain.)  Can’t you listen with the speaker?  How will we keep them from eating your little parts, bits of wire, and globs of solder?  Electricity is not a toy!”

We laughed at the last one.  And she added, “I hope they’re all girls who want everything hot pink—so much hot pink that we want to barf.”

I suppose if someone makes a hot-pink Hello Kitty AK-47 (the photo actually looks like a painting of an AR-15) and the Sarah-cuda bow, we can find hot-pink solder irons, paddle finger pieces, headphones, and even radios (I seem to recall that there was a BabyPhat mod’ed hot-pink Motorola HT floating around the web a few years ago).

Anyhow, this post is for Sarah because she puts up with a lot of tinkering, RFI, and headphone time and gets very little blog recognition in return for it.

(The photo above is of Ft Rock, Oregon, taken by me when I was on assignment there.)

Yesterday, I revisited this post listing on-going projects from December 2009.  Some things have changed, some remain the same.

The computer stuff has all been crossed-off the list, except that the home server is off-line with a dead power supply (or motherboard).  I’m somewhat loathe to spend any money on it, but I should be able to pick something up.

While it would probably have been cheaper to buy one of the HF/VHF/UHF combo radios, I’ve set off stupidly down the trail of building (and interfacing) transverters.  I am just three amplifier stages away from having 3-5 watts on 50 MHz!  …plus the interfacing.  I’ve decided that interfacing transverters to radios is more difficult than actually designing and building the transverters themselves.  I built the 903-MHz W1GHZ transverter during the Winter, but haven’t tried it on the air just yet.  W8ISS announced recently that he had some leftovers from the group buy of W1GHZ transverter parts, including boards for 2304 and 3456 as well as some G6Y relay kits.  I bought the lot.  I have enough MMICs and chip caps in the shop to build these and since I’ll need to order a couple of mixers for the other transverters, I can hit the Mini-Circuits minimum order.  Sometime.  Microwaves may all get pushed off to Fall and Winter.

Through a strange coincidence, my wife and I independently decided that it would be a good idea to move my ham shack.  The new location is closer to the center of activity in the house, which means I’ll operate more radio and be more accessible to her while I’m doing it.  But, the feedline and rotator cable no longer reach my 144-MHz Yagi.  Fortunately, I’ll be able to raid the K8GU coax stash shortly.  In the mean time, I’ve been missing what appear from the Hepburn maps to be epic tropo conditions.  Stuff happens.

QSLing, notably my favorite QSL topic—bureau cards.  All bureau requests for KP4/K8GU have been processed.  I ran out of CE/K8GU cards with 10 to go.  I will run some more of these from a photo printer in the next couple of days.  Piles of PJ2/K8GU, K8GU, and (go figure) AA8UP cards remain.  I will get the PJ2 cards done this weekend since I have a box of cards on-hand.  K8GU and AA8UP cards are awaiting a redesign.

Although it sounds like a lot, relatively little is getting done on any of these things thanks to an outdoor project at home.  More on this in the future.

Jeff, KE9V, posted a note today about all of the bellyaching that goes on over the Hamvention venue at Hara Arena in Dayton, Ohio, also occasional home to Bill Goodman’s North American Gun and Knife Show (“Tell a buddy, bring a friend…Don’t you dare miss it!” the jingle goes).  In fact, according to the Hara calendar, it appears to host almost monthly gun and knife shows.  But, I digress.  I’m delighted that Hara is near my in-laws’ home should I ever wish to make a last-minute appearance—yes, it’s tempting to get in the car tonight.  And, I digress farther.  The point of this post is to explain the pervasive grumbling, finger-pointing, and misinformation, that spews forth from a vocal minority of the amateur community.

I was sitting in 8th grade math class adrift in daydreams as the teacher reviewed yet another topic from a prior grade.  Clearly, this was a widely-perceived problem, because one of my classmates persisted in talking to several others around her.  Finally, the teacher became so exasperated that he asked, “Young lady, do you have a license to talk?”  Of course she did not, but I chuckled noting that, as a newly-minted General class amateur radio operator, I had a license to talk.  I tucked that away for future use and went back to whatever it was I was daydreaming about.  And today, some 16 years later, the thought sprung into my mind as I read Jeff’s blog.

Another curious coincidence contributed to this confluence of cogitation.  As I was eating my lunch, I happened across an old KK7B paper from the Proceedings of Microwave Update ‘94 entitled “Simply Getting on the Air from DC to Daylight.”  It’s not a particularly technical paper.  It is about the art of doing radio and it was fun to read.  In the first three paragraphs, he writes,

In the not-so-distant past, the primary emphasis in amateur radio was putting a station on the air…Sometime in the ’70s the ARRL stopped calling amateur radio a technical hobby and started referring to it as a communications hobby.

Brilliant.  I’d like to update that for the present,

In the not-so-distant past, the primary emphasis in amateur radio was communication via radio…Sometime in the ’00s, realizing that it had lost the communications game to telecom deregulation, mobile phones, and the Internet, the ARRL stopped calling amateur radio a communications hobby and started referring to it as an emergency service.

So, where does that leave us?  Well, we have a technical license exam structure impressed upon a group of people who are enthralled with communication but use the Internet because it’s easier.  No wonder anybody who reads about ham radio on the Internet thinks we’re up a creek!

I’m going to go make a CW contact or melt some solder to cheer myself up.  In the end, we have a license to communicate via radio.  Let’s use it.