Ham radio – Page 31 – AB4UG Radioblog

Amateur radio licensing tests

Did you know that here in Charleston SC there are ham radio licensing tests (VE testing) administered on a regular basis? That makes it pretty easy to get your amateur radio license once you’re ready.

The Charleston Amateur Radio Society (CARS/WA4USN) holds licensing tests on the second Saturday of every other month (even numbered months) up at Trident Medical Center starting at 9AM.

The Trident Amateur Radio Club (TARC/W4ANK) holds their licensing tests the third Wednesday of each month at the Goose Creek Masonic Lodge starting at 7PM.

In addition to the regular VE testing sessions, both groups will conduct classes followed by testing if there’s sufficient interest. Just contact them to make arrangements.

So, once you’re finished studying, just head on over to the next VE testing session, show your IDs, pay the fee, take the test and walk out with your new/upgraded amateur radio license!

Ham meetup? Ham-up?

Ham radio clubs can be a great place to meet other hams and to find out what’s going on in the local ham community. In the Charleston area, there are two formal clubs that I’m aware of. I’ve been a member of the Charleston Amateur Radio Society (CARS) since I got licensed, and recently learned about the Trident Amateur Radio Club (TARC).

CARS has their regular meetings on the second Monday of each month, and while the meetings are a good source of info for what’s happening in the area, they’re rather business-like and can be kind of boring. TARC meetings are on the third Monday of the month. I haven’t made it to a TARC meeting yet but from what I’ve seen on their website, their meetings seem a little more casual.

Outside of regular club meetings, I haven’t come across many other gatherings of local radio people. There’s a Monday/Wednesday/Friday breakfast meetup at the Bojangles on Ashley Phosphate. It’s a nice little meetup that I’ve had a couple of opportunities to get to when I have an excuse to be in that area for work. It’s not something I can get to on a regular basis though.

It got me thinking that it would be nice to have a regular evening or weekend gathering where local radio people can get together. There are numerous possibilities for things to do:

talk about radio
get on the air and play radio
check out the newest rig
make things
share/collaborate on projects
code practice
study group for getting/upgrading your amateur radio license
sharing radio know-how
just hang out for some face-to-face rag chewing.

As for meeting places, it could really be anywhere. Coffee shop, someone’s garage, out in a park or field somewhere.

Anybody interested?

CQ WPX Contesting

Spent some time yesterday and today playing on the radio during the CQ WPX SSB contest. It’s a 48 hour long contest with an exchange of RS(T) and incremental contact number and multipliers for the number of unique prefixes worked.

Instead of using paper logs this time, I installed the N1MM contest logger on the laptop and logged everything there. It conveniently has a list of different contests, including CQ WPX and does all the scoring for you. N1MM is clearly designed to have a connection to the radio to get frequency info, which I don’t have yet so each contact I had to edit the log entry and change the frequency. Slightly inconvenient, but after a while I got used to it.

I spent about 4 hours on the radio Friday night after the contest started (000Z 30-Mar-2013) and didn’t get back to it until this morning. One of the things that I thought was interesting was seeing the contest activity march down the bands as the day went on. Friday night, almost all the activity I heard was on 40m, but this morning, there wasn’t any contest activity that I could hear on 40m. Most of the contest activity was happening on 15m. As the day went on, contest activity on 15m faded away and 20m started becoming more active during the late afternoon hours. Then activity on 40m started picking up during the early evening up until I decided to call it quits around 1930.

Not entirely sure if it’s all related to how band conditions change through the day. There’s a lot about propagation that I’m interested in learning about and I’m pretty sure I was seeing some of that changing propagation through the day.

I worked a total of about 12 hours on and off during the contest and tallied up 82 contacts. It’s the longest stretch of contesting I’ve done so far. Don’t know what my farthest contact was, but I worked a lot of European stations. One of the nice things N1MM does is calculate the contest score for you. Mine came out to 17901 with 81 unique prefixes worked.

It was fun playing in this contest, more so for listening and observing the band activity than the contacts (although that’s always nice). Looking forward to seeing how the overall results look.

QST magazines available

Last summer at one of the radio club meetings, one of the older hams brought in a small stack of QST magazines that he didn’t want any more and asked if I’d be interested in them. Being newly licensed, I said sure!

I’ve gone through them a few times now, and with Connie’s collection of QST, these are duplicates now so I thought I’d pass them along to someone else to enjoy.

There aren’t a whole lot of them. I have Oct 2011-Feb 2012 and April-May 2012. Would prefer to hand them off to someone local, but I’d also consider shipping them.

Softrock Lite II ready to put on the air

At long last I’ve finally gotten around to putting the coax and interface cord on the Softrock Lite II receiver. The cord to plug into the sound card came from some old discarded speakers, and the coax is a short length of RG58 with an SMA connector that I picked up a while ago. I was originally going to use it for an antenna project for the VX8-DR, but figured I could always get another one later.

Now I just need to find some time to get it on the air. If I want to use the antenna, I’ll have to find an SMA (female) to SO-239 adapter, or make some jumper wires to connect the ends.