About a week and a half ago, I received an email from Etienne K7ATN, asking me if would be able to participate in an event he organized called the Portland Urban S2S Party. In a nutshell, this was an effort to get activators on as many of the “urban” SOTA summits in the Portland area so… Read More SOTA After Action Report – Cooper Mountain
The final chapter of the Hi Juno event has arrived at the NT7S shack. After months of waiting and wondering if my reception report was received, I returned home from a SOTA activation to find the beautiful Hi Juno QSL in my mailbox. Thanks to the folks at JPL who coordinated this intriguing event and… Read More The Final Courtesy
My last blog post (from two months ago, sorry about that) detailed my participation in the worldwide Hi Juno event; a coordinated effort from amateur radio operators from around the world to send a very slow speed Morse Code signal (HI, to be exact…DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT DIT-DIT) to the Juno spacecraft as it slingshotted around Earth on… Read More We Make Contact
As I write this, the Juno spacecraft has completed its slingshot maneuver around Earth, having stolen a bit of Earth’s rotation energy. and is now on its way out to Jupiter. A bit before the designated 1800 UTC start time for the event, I was able to set up my Icom IC-718 at the appointed… Read More Hi Juno After-Action Report
Polyvaricons Now For Sale I’ve decided to try a small experiment and see if there’s any interest in selling a small selection of components that would be handy for RF experimenters. The first product I have up for sale (in limited quantities at this time) are four-packs of the somewhat-hard-to-find polyvaricon variable capacitor for only… Read More Wideband Transmission #3
Last night, I had the very first 2x CC1 QSO with Dave AA7EE on 40 meters. Rather than try to blather about it, I’ll let the video do the talking. Needless to say, we were both quite stoked!
Even though I’ve been insanely busy with home life and running Etherkit, I felt like I needed to get out and do a bit of operating to get back in touch with that aspect of amateur radio. In the past few years, Dave W8NF has invited me to come up to the OTVARC Field Day… Read More Field Day 2012
Now that we are starting to get settled into a routine life with our new baby boy Eli, I’ve been able to sneak in some more work on the OpenBeacon project. The beta test is going fairly well, but I made a poor design decision in choosing a USB Micro-B connector and also made some… Read More OpenBeacon Update
This post is a bit late, but I wanted to be sure to document my first attempt at a SOTA activation and what I learned from it. The title is probably a bit harsh, but the eternal pessimist in me couldn’t help it. I decided to attempt a SOTA activation after seeing a lot of… Read More SOTA Fail on Clatskanie Mountain
I don’t know exactly why, but I’ve had a bit of an obsession with the T32C DXpedition to Kiritimati since they got started a few weeks ago. Maybe because I found them easier to work than many of the DXpeditions that I’ve tried before. The fact that they are a very well-run operation has something… Read More Two Watts Across the Pacific