KM1NDY
A Secret Little Adventure Ham Radio Blog
FUZZ FACE LIVES!!!! The 3rd Iteration Of The Hairy Guitar Pedal Works!!!! (Video & Audio Demos)
[Update: I included some audio files of me on the electric ukulele. Don’t laugh too hard!] Of all of the places I expected ham radio to take me, audio engineering was definitely not one of them. I am not much of a musician, though I can strum a few chords rather choppily on the ukulele. …
Building “Fuzz Face” & Oh My Goodness
Oscilloscope. Signal generator. DC power supply. DMM. LCR meter. A trunkload of components. A still non-functioning diy fuzz face guitar pedal…
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 …
Weekend Workshop On Electronics: Homeschooling Myself On How A Radio Works
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 …
CB And The Dummy: Yet Another O-Scope Adventure
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. …
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 …