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!
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 Society 6m 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.
Coming up on Saturday is the Central States VHF Society Spring VHF/UHF Sprints. It’s a short 4 hour affair starting at 7PM and ending at 11PM (2300Z-0300Z).
After reading a copy of Six Meters: A Guide to the Magic Band that I found at a used book store, it seemed like it would be a pretty cool band to play on. I usually don’t hear much on 6m during my casual twiddling around on the radio dial. I really don’t know how the antenna performs on 6m aside from the fact that the radio seems to be able to tune it there. Hopefully this will be a chance to find out. Hopefully there will be some good propagation for me on Saturday.
Got in the mood to play with the camera a bit and the most interesting subject around was the J-38 straight key.
I should really spend some time to clean it up some.