KM1NDY
A Secret Little Adventure Ham Radio Blog
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 …
The weekend is winding down. I’ll be heading out to the roller rink shortly. AA1F is back from his trip to New York. I am experiencing that letdown you feel after a terrifically good time has come to an end, and real life is about to kick in again. I decided last week that I …
Unfortunately, I took a blurry photo. My workbench has been expanding. The radio is citizen’s band, an Uniden Bearcat 880 that I thought was broken. Then my new dummy load, and MFJ-264N. It’s a bit hard to tell, but there are 3 power supplies tucked in around the monitor. A soldering station in the background. …
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 …
Bemoaning my lack of reasonable understanding of electricity, someone on a radio forum essentially told me “Suck it up, Buttercup! Buy a used analog oscilloscope and a copy of Michael Geier’s ‘How to Diagnose and Fix Everything Electronic’, and learn it!” Well, that seemed easy enough… The book was an simple purchase. The o-scope, on …
“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 …
Sure, the Slim Jim and it’s cousin, the J-Pole, can be easy beginner antennas to make. But there are so many things to take into consideration when building one that it becomes an all out lesson in antenna theory if you let it. Lets start with the basics: How does the darn thing work anyway??? …