KM1NDY
A Secret Little Adventure Ham Radio Blog
Category: Adventure
The Return To The Caboose! Chester On Track Festival 2022 & The W1R Special Event Station
Life is such a meandering journey. Back in January 2021, when AA1F was still WX1MAR, and this blog was in its infancy, we rented the Caboose at the Chester Railway Station & Museum for Winter Field Day. It was an extremely cold stay with single digit temperatures. The post is here and the throwback photo …
The Ten-Point SOTA Return To Slide Mountain, & “There Won’t Be Snow In April In The Catskills”
There was snow. I only wore my crocs, my hiking shoe of choice but not for a foot of slushy, melting spring snow. It was 50 degrees. The peak of Slide was 2.8 miles away. Rock hopping up the base of the mountain made the early part of the trail easy. The trail was soupy, …
The Craziest Antenna That *Still* Never Was…
You may recall in this post, that AA1F and I were shut out of getting our SOTA point on Oak Hill W1/MV-006 near Concord NH due to a thunderstorm. This meant that I could not attempt to put that rusty twisted tangle of metal residing on the peak of the small hill on the air. …
Ham Radio Hodge Podge – A Week’s Worth Of RF Obsession
Look carefully at that radio in the picture above? Recognize it? I’ll come back to it at the end of this post. The odd places radio takes you. Below is Pocumtuck Rock in Deerfield MA. It is the same place the picture above was taken. The WGAF-FM tower sits above the Eaglebrook Boarding School. It …
The Impatient Ham’s Perfect Vertical Antenna (And A Bit More On That Random Wire Tuner)
AA1F was celebrating a special day, so he needed a special present. While our love of radio is simultaneously growing, our ambitions in the hobby are different. AA1F embraces the “appliance operator” label, wanting easy to deploy gear that consistently works so he can reliably and rapidly get on the air and make contacts. Me, …
Real Hams Don’t Leave Home Without A Tarp! And The Craziest Antenna You’ve Ever Seen That Never Was…
We would wake up early so I could scour the Seacoast Amateur Radio Flea Market in Hampton MA for some crystals and variable capacitors and then head over to the little bump called “Oak Hill” (W1/MV-006) for a Summits-On-The-Air activation. My ulterior motive, inspired by this thread on QRZ.com, was to use this as an …
DIY No-Solder, Cheap, Stupidly Easy & Simple Dipole Antenna (And By The Way, What Is An Antenna And How Does It Work?)
Are you a no-code, appliance operator type of ham who memorized the general class amateur radio test questions in order to be able to talk on the high frequency bands? Well, me too. Or at least I was. And then I got sucked into this weird 3+ year long vortex of RF lovefest. And, oh …
Let The Lion Roar! The Parks-On-The-Air Rapid Deployment Amateur Radio (POTA RaDAR) Challenge
Most hams have heard of Parks-On-The-Air. They know that they need to make a certain number of contacts (10) in a zulu day in order to successfully activate a park. Not quite as many realize that there is another contest within the POTA umbrella, the Rapid Deployment Amateur Radio (RaDAR) challenge. Born out of an …