Miscellaneous babble – Page 4

Call sign history – AB4UG

Inspired by Alan/W2AEW’s most recent video, Ham Radio call sign history, and my QSL card quest and some Twitter posts by W5RST and W0EA, I thought I’d dig into the past of my current call sign, AB4UG. I don’t expect it to be as interesting or storied as some other call signs, but it will be interesting to see what I can find out.

I knew AB4UG had been used previously by someone else because of looking it up in the AE7Q database as well as the FCC ULS database. Both list only one previous user for AB4UG from KY, issued 1990-03-13 and expired in 2000-03-13. The AE7Q database suggests a pre-ULS history, but no further details.

A Google search for AB4UG shows mostly my stuff or references to me, but then a couple pages down is a page listing some SK’s (silent keys) for the Southern Ohio Amateur Radio Association where the previous AB4UG is listed.

Found a page where WN8F mentions helping the previous AB4UG holder get his license and elmering him.

Workbench acquisitions

Purchased a few more supplies for the workbench that arrived in the mail today.

A couple of coax jumper cables and BNC adapters for connecting things to the oscilloscope, 2 1000′ spools of heat strippable magnet wire and 10 pieces of single sided copper clad PCB.

Looking forward to my first builds on the copper clad.

73 Magazine

Being new to amateur radio, I’m discovering all kinds of cool new-to-me things.

This past week I’ve seen a lot of people mention the death of Wayne Green/W2NSD, who I gathered was a pretty prominent personality in the ham radio world. Along with that were references to 73 Magazine, which he published for over 40 years. A post on the EMRFD Yahoo! group brought me to the complete collection of 73 Magazine on the Internet Archive.

73 Magazine (also known as 73 Amateur Radio Today) (OCLC 22239204) was a United States-based amateur radio magazine that was published from 1960 to 2003. It was known for its strong emphasis on technical articles and for the lengthy editorials in each issue by its founder and publisher, Wayne Green. The magazine title, 73, means “best regards” in amateur radio lingo. Green, a former editor of CQ Amateur Radio magazine, published the first issue of 73 in October 1960.

Naturally, being a sucker for the old and vintage, such a huge magazine archive is like finding treasure. A bit of searching brought me to a Perl script someone had written to suck the PDFs of all the issues out of IA, so I let it run to chew up some bandwidth.

Looking forward to browsing through the archive. Should be pretty cool to read through.

A good way to get volunteered

A good way to get volunteered to do something is to mention that something needs attention or doing. The radio club I’m a member of (CARS) is no exception.

At the last meeting, I mentioned that searching the ARRL website for clubs didn’t bring up CARS, or any of the CARS VE test sessions, to which the club president replied (paraphrasing here) “So does that mean you want to look into it?”

Sure, what the heck. I figure it will be a good chance to find out al little more about the club and get my feet wet with helping out with the club.

blog.AB4UG.net

In preparation for archiving this blog to start fresh, I started up a new blog over at https://blog.ab4ug.net/ where I think I’ll post most of my electronics and amateur radio adventures.

It’s a vanilla MovableType 5.2 set up right now. Nothing fancy, but functional. The archives here at Imablog will stay and I’ll probably start over with a new MT5.2 install and database. Still mulling something Drupal-y though. Haven’t quite decided yet.

I’ll probably cross-post material at the AB4UG blog here also so that nobody feels left out.