Imabug's journey into electronics and amateur radio as AB4UG and VA6BUG
There’s an idea for a BarcampCHS session brewing in my head. Something along the lines of open source software and amateur radio. There’s a fair bit of it out there, most of which is something I’m interested in learning more about (like GNURadio). What better way to make yourself learn about something than to try to give a presentation on it, right?
The idea isn’t very well formed yet and may or may not happen, but it’s there. I’ve got until November to figure it out. Plenty of time, right?
Another ARRL Field Day is upon us!
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.
TARC will be having their Field Day activities up in Goose Creek at the Marguerite H. Brown Municipal Center.
If you’re in the vicinity of either one of these Field Day locations, stop by and check out the amateur radio operations!
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.
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)
First I took the little Morse code kit and put it onto a breadboard. Over at adafruit.com, they have these neat Perma-Proto PCBs that are circuit board versions of a breadboard. Makes it easy to transfer something you’ve assembled on a breadboard to something a little more permanent.
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.
A nice relaxing couple of hours spent melting some solder.