KM1NDY
A Secret Little Adventure Ham Radio Blog
Lets start with the fact that there is no S2 port on the NanoVNA. There is a “1” port. And there is a “0” port. Or lets talk about that S12 measurements tell you how well a transmission goes from port 2 to port 1. NOT how well the power of the transmission goes from …
Potentiometers for crying out loud…what the heck did you think I was talking about?!? And don’t get any ideas that you caught me here. I am a well-established straight-edged teetotaler. I came back from NEAR-Fest at the Deerfield Fairgrounds in New Hampshire two weekends ago with a box of variable resistors that only cost me …
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, …
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. …
Oscilloscope. Signal generator. DC power supply. DMM. LCR meter. A trunkload of components. A still non-functioning diy fuzz face guitar pedal…
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 …
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, …
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 …