Amateur Radio · VHF/UHF · Summits On The Air · Colorado Mountains · Adventure
Richard Garriott, W5KWQ is on his way to the International Space Station (ISS) as the sixth “space tourist” riding on a Soyuz spacecraft. This would be just another rich guy buys a ride into space story, except that Richard is a ham radio operator, a successful technogeek and the son of a famous astronaut. For … Read more
My spouse’s notebook computer died a few weeks ago, about 1 year after the 1 year warranty expired. This was not very satisfying. I also had my notebook PC die this past year, so it is starting to look like notebooks are disposal devices. Funny, my desktop PCs just keep on going year after year … Read more
I’ve been out of town quite a bit for work and pleasure, so here’s a catch up post of several bits and pieces. You may have heard that Sarah Palin’s email got hacked. The background story is here on Wired’s site. The yahoo mail account was apparently accessed using the password reset system. That’s where … Read more
I was looking out the window the other day and noticed that my wire HF antenna is laying on the ground. Hmmm, probably doesn’t radiate very well that way. But if I put a long, lossy coaxial cable in line, the SWR will still be good at the transmitter. And I can tell my buddies … Read more
One of my old PCs sitting in the basement had Windows 98 on it. The computer was named Ernie by my daughter many years ago. (The taller computer we had at the time received the name Bert, as in Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street.) The OS seemed to be dieing a slow death as … Read more
On the dstar_digital Yahoo group, someone asked about how to deal with complaints about certain hams ragchewing on a particular system at all hours of the day and night. The specific example was about a d-star “reflector” but the concept applies to many types of ham radio operating. It seems that other users on the … Read more