KM1NDY
A Secret Little Adventure Ham Radio Blog
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 …
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 …
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 …
“No, I’m serious, I wouldn’t have done it if I knew it was this long.” It dawned on AA1F that this really would be nearly a 7 mile hike. I caught him eating a sandwich at the top of the toughest stretch of Mount Shaw. With over 2300 feet of vertical gain, and an extremely …
So that is the Overlook Mountain House. Or it was. Or one of a few of them. An interesting site with a lot of destructive fires sitting on a very high perch. This blog has a lot to say about it: http://www.hudsonvalleyruins.org/yasinsac/overlook/overlook.html. Its our third time up Overlook Mountain W2/GC-112, chasing its four rather easy …
We neglected to take photos until we were packing up and the daylight was dimming. The drab gray images fail to show the spurious 50F mid February New England day, the bright sunshine that blanketed us earlier, or the 30% chance of precipitation that never happened. Thus concluded the Second Annual Happy Hams Valentine’s Day …
My homemade antenna unun was rattling. Somehow the second bolt holding the SO-239 mount went missing and the nuts and washers were now free floating on the inside of the box. This meant that the capacitor leg soldered to that bolt was also dangling. At quarter to one, Winter Field Day was about to begin, …
If you see a coupla shiny glass marbles engraved with my name, mind giving them back? I am pretty sure I lost a few… I took a ride up to Salisbury Beach State Reservation to set up an antenna and try my hand at the North American QSO Party (NAQP SSB) for a few hours. …
(Special thanks to Joe WB1EMS for letting me use his pictures!) The Great Hill Gang’s monthly “Day of Radio” perched on top of Great Hill Park in Weymouth MA is quickly becoming one of my favorite radio events. Organizer Mike K1UVH is fond of saying “We are not fair weather hams.” And, well, they are …
SOTA ain’t easy. Summits-On-The-Air is a game with essentially one prize for radio hikers: The Mountain Goat. In order to become a Mountain Goat, you need to “activate” (the term used for hiking up a mountain and operating an amateur radio from its summit) enough mountains to get 1000 points. Based on elevation, the shortest …