This is the most difficult article I’ve ever had to write, not only because I lost a very good friend, but also because it’s so hard for me to put into words and express the impact this person had on my life and others. I met Rob about 25 years ago. Rob lived in Philly working long hours programming minicomputers. He developed various medical issues and had to retire early, relocating to the Poconos here in Pennsylvania. He tended to be a night owl, sleeping all day and relentlessly pursuing amateur radio projects at night. We served at our struggling local ham radio club for several years, me ..read more

I have been working on a homebrew 40 meter CW transceiver for over a year now. It’s a superhet design, with all discrete components built ugly style on copper clad board. I’ve taken various circuit designs I’ve built in the past and added some new ones. The project has been a great opportunity for me to use and learn about the NanoVNA. Every stage I built, tested, and tweaked with the NanoVNA, and recorded results in my lab notebook. The rig features a 4 Mhz IF, mainly due to me having a ton of these crystals. I built wide and narrow filters, just futzing around with various crystal and capaci ..read more

Found in my grandfather’s ham radio stash…. This article was originally posted on Radio Artisan ..read more

My favorite amateur radio event of the year, by far, is Field Day. Each year ARRL issues a new Field Day logo. Let’s take a look at logos of years past. First, let’s get the mediocre ones out of the way. The 1980’s called. They want their logo back.The 2006 logo was meh. Get ready for more radio waves.The 2019 logo wasn’t awful, but it was rather unremarkable and low effort. At least replace the yellow with something else. Is that a target or radio waves?I think the 2015 logo was made with Microsoft Word on someone’s lunch break, another low effort logo. Hey, where’s the ARRL diamond/antenna c ..read more

Late last year I applied an operating system update to my Macbook and my solid state hard drive peed all over itself. Long story short, I was unable to boot from the drive or read it and I had to start all over with a different hard drive and a fresh OS installation. I was able to recover all my files from the cloud except a recent backup of my logbook. It appears backups of my logbook, which MacLogger DX apparently stored in a hidden directory not in the Documents folder, was not being backed up to the cloud. The last logbook backup I can locate is from 2015. But honestly, I don’t care. I’m d ..read more

ARRL reported on continuing efforts to “counter the continuing threat to Amateur Radio’s secondary use of the 3 GHz band” in response to a “provision in the $3.5 Billion Budget Reconciliation Bill that would have required approximately 200 MHz of the 3.1-3.45 GHz band be reallocated to the use of 5G vendors.” Meanwhile, FCC Auction 110, which has for sale 100 MHz of spectrum from the neighboring 3.45 to 3.55 GHz band, in the first round of bidding has generated $1B in bids. The total minimum reserve price for Auction 110 is $14.7B ..read more

Let’s just be real for a moment. A lot of people hate FT8. You all have seen it in social media and on the air. It’s a popular mode, so popular in fact that one report citing Club Log data recently showed that 80% of HF contacts in their tracking nowadays are FT8. This increase has come at the expense of other mode activity, especially CW. What’s worse in the minds of some, is that accomplishments like DXCC which used to take several to many years to reach is being significantly shortened with the use of FT8. I’ve often thought it’s a fait accompli achieving DXCC, one just needs to sit in ..read more

Since the pandemic started up over a year ago, I haven’t done any air travel and have been driving to all business functions. Luckily all my work has been in The Northeast and within a reasonable driving distance of my home, though I often have six to eight hours of driving in a day. So, needless to say, I’ve had a lot of windshield time on interstates the last 12 months. In this past year, I think I’ve counted perhaps three or four amateur radio license plates on vehicles, total. I’ve identified maybe three other vehicles that didn’t have amateur radio license plates, but looking at the anten ..read more

The theme of this year’s Dayton Hamvention is The Gathering, not to be confused with the annual Insane Clown Posse event of the same name. Out of an abundance of caution, Insane Clown Posse cancelled their 2020 event, prompting several folks to call them Reasonable Clown Posse. This article originally appeared on Radio Artisan ..read more

In social media circles there has been much discussion about Field Day in light of COVID-19 restrictions.  Many traditional club operations are going to be cancelled this year due to social distancing requirements and the need to protect ourselves and especially vulnerable members of our population, of which there are many in amateur radio. Folks are going to continue to participate from home this year.  Many people undoubtedly are going to recreate the “traditional” FD experience they are accustomed to, operating in their backyard, perhaps in a tent with temporary antennas, emergenc ..read more