Like last year, I’ll be helping out with the CARS Field Day activities over on the Yorktown. Now that I’ve got a little bit more radio experience under my belt, I’ll be able to help out more with the preparations and will enjoy playing with the radios more than last time.
In preparation for Field Day, I’ve been given the task of getting the club laptops ready: installing updates and performing maintenance, updating the logging software (N3FJP), and getting them networked together so that operators at each station can see what’s going on.
This year’s trip to Atlanta Hamfest marks a bit of an anniversary for me. Last year at Hamfest, I got to meet up with Connie, and got my General class ham radio license.
Had a great time at this year’s Hamfest again. We met up with Jim (N4BFR) and Newt (N4EWT) again, who I met at Hamfest last year. Had dinner with Jim and his wife Tammy, got a tour of their new house and the new shack. Connie and I both served as VEs at the testing session (my first time as a VE). I helped proctor the test and even got to sign off on some CSCEs for people who passed their test. Attended an early morning forum titled Linux in the Shack. Learned about the Shackbox linux distro which I might have to check out.
Both the outside swap area/boneyard and the inside vendor area were pretty well populated again this year, although it seemed like there weren’t quite as many people selling in the boneyard this year as last year. The Hamfest crowd also seemed a bit smaller this year too. A big chunk of my Hamfest time was spent in the test session though, so I might have missed seeing the bulk of the crowd.
Out in the boneyard I managed to score a pretty sweet deal on an MFJ 259B antenna analyzer in excellent condition. Picked it up for $150 with far less haggling than I expected. Used up all of my Hamfest spending money, plus two months worth of our ham radio budget, but it was too good of a deal to pass up. I’ll just have to wait until later to pick up the connectors, adapters and other antenna stuff I was originally planning on getting.
MFJ259B antenna analyzer
Another great trip to another great Hamfest. Not sure if we’ll be back next year but we’ll see.
Road tripping out to Atlanta for the Atlanta Hamfest this weekend. It was at Atlanta Hamfest last year that I first got my amateur radio license, so that means it’s been just about one year that I’ve been a license amateur radio guy.
This year I’ll get to help out as a VE at the testing session held at the hamfest. My first time as a VE!
The list of forums looks pretty interesting this year. I think I want to go check out the Linux in the Shack and the QRP forums.
This time I’ll know a little more about what I’m looking at and looking for at the hamfest. At the top of the list will be things for the workbench: coax cables, various adapters and connectors, maybe a key or paddle, and some antenna making supplies.
Looking forward to the hamfest this weekend. I wonder who won’t win the door prize (a Kenwood TS-590S)
I picked up a few a little while ago with the intention of transferring the breadboard version of the Morse code kit to a Perma-Proto board and finally got around to it this evening.
Morse code practice oscillator
A nice relaxing couple of hours spent melting some solder.
Well, not only does the radio tune the antenna on 6m/50 MHz, but the radio and antenna seem to work pretty decently.
Spent about 3 hours tuning around on 6m in the Central States VHF Society6m Sprint contest last night in seek and pounce mode. Tallied up 10 contacts all from grid squares in the northeast plus one in Wisconson. Got some VA3/VE3 stations too. All of them were coming in pretty loud here. I came across several other stations that were just barely audible in the noise. I could hear something there, but not enough to try to work them. Most of the activity I heard was in the lower portion of the 50 MHz band, below 50.3 MHz. I went as high as 50.5 MHz, but didn’t go much higher.
A bit of Googling brought me to this ADIF mapping utility by K2DSL that puts my contacts onto a Google map based on the grid square. It’s kind of neat to see where the signals are coming from.
I think I’ll add some kind of 6m antenna to the list of Things To Build for the summer. Will be interesting to see if I can make some more distant contacts with a dedicated antenna.
