vk2rh: a blog about ham radio
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Grinding quartz and holding a frequency during World War II
I’m a great fan of the Prelinger Archives which is home to so many items like this video I’ve heard about recently from various ham radio email lists. I like how the components of the earliest electronics and wireless were so basic and ‘natural’. Think of hand made capacitors and resistors using traces of graphite on paper.…
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Reading in your head – the long path to morse code bliss
I’m one of those people who learnt morse code completely the wrong way. Starting off in the seventies with no guide I simply tuned into nightly morse transmissions sent by local hams at a very slow rate. I think they started at 5 words a minute. The main risk there was nodding off between words…
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Lightweight portable VHF antennas
One of my favourite sites is Martin DK7ZB’s collection of pages detailing the construction of practical antennas for VHF and UHF. I first visited the site following a link to designs for lightweight portable yagis that would be suitable for SOTA VHF activations. Under the link ‘2m/70cm-Yagis ultralight’, Martin describes a number of yagis for 2m and…
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SOTA launch in VK2
News is just in that SOTA – Summits on the Air – starts in a number of new call areas tomorrow including my home state New South Wales, VK2. I understand that Queensland VK4 and Hawaii KH6 may also be launched tomorrow, 1st September. The new VK2 association adds over a thousand summits to the SOTA database.…
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CW Academy FB
Yesterday I had my final CW Academy session. As an indication of how good it was and how much we valued it, not one of the five of us ever missed a single session! There were sixteen hour-long sessions over two months. And it was all free! Late last year I noticed a couple of messages from…
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New KD1JV ultralight rig for 80/160
There’s been a higher than usual level of activity on the AT-Sprint email list over the last few days as hints have emerged of a possible new offering of the popular MTR (Mountain Topper Radio) the latest of Steve Weber KD1JV’s radios that define the possibilities of ‘trail friendly’. To get a view of one…
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Hidden heroes
The BBC have just broadcast and put on YouTube an excellent hour long documentary about two people whose wartime work is credited with shortening the war and saving millions of lives. Yet because of the cold war and the climate of secrecy, credit came late or not at all. UPDATE: The YouTube video has been…
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Solar news
Under the title “Earth braces for biggest space storm in five years” ABC Australia’s online news reports on the last 24 hours of solar activity. A NOAA space scientist is quoted “Space weather has gotten very interesting over the past 24 hours”. Further detail as usual from http://www.spaceweather.com and http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/today.html. UPDATE: 24 hours later – “Space storm fizzle“!
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Big Day Out at Wyong
Just back from a few hours spent at the annual field day at Wyong hosted by the Central Coast Amateur Radio Club. This has to be the big day out for Australian radio amateurs. People came from near and far. It’s a good barometer of the health of the hobby and the local industry supporting it.I was delighted to see…
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At last the wait is over
The final hours before the actual opening of orders for the new Elecraft KX3 saw a mix of bizarre behaviours on the KX3 email list from impatient petulance and other weirdly strange attention seeking. They were a tiny minority in a sea of patient fans happy with the frequent updates from the Elecraft team. In the end…
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Waiting list update
On Halloween Steve Weber KD1JV has announced to the AT-Sprint Yahoogroup he’s considering planning to take orders online for the ATS-4B at 11:11:11 AM, EDT on the 11th November, 2011. Clearly a time and date not to be forgotten. Shipping would follow close behind then. One exciting aspect of this latest ATS-4B version is the planned integrated…
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ATS-4 b due late September / early October
UPDATE: As of mid October the new availability date for the ATS-4B is November 2011. Also Steven Weber is developing a daughter board to enable the ATS-4B to decode PSK and CW – which has a January 2012 delivery date. This board can’t be added to the earlier ATS-4A. Since late June, Steven Weber’s site at http://kd1jv.qrpradio.com has displayed a…