What About the Yaesu FT-4XR?

The Baofeng UV-5R established a new price point for an entry-level handheld transceiver and quickly became the “easy choice” for a newly licensed Technician. It is a very impressive piece of technology for the money (about $30). However, it is well known that the UV-5R struggles to meet the FCC Part 97 emission requirements. The … Read more

So You Think You Have a Big Antenna

Many hams put up some pretty impressive antenna farms with large towers and big arrays. I have a small tower up at the cabin but it is quite puny (about 30 feet) compared to these more serious stations. I like to check out big antenna installations, especially the big commercial towers, as we travel around … Read more

A Notable 2m Radio Contact

For the 2019 CQ Worldwide VHF Contest, I did a modest effort on 6 meters and 2 meters using mostly SSB and FT8. I operated from our cabin (DM78av). We had some good sporadic-E propagation on 6m which enabled some long-distance contacts to the east.  Then I noticed that 2 meters was also open so … Read more

Top Five K0NR Blog Posts for 2019

Closing out 2019, here are the top five blog posts at k0nr.com during the year. Some people may see this as a lazy way of creating one more blog post for the year without much work. This may be true, but I still claim it is a worthy effort to take a look at what … Read more

Innovation in Vehicle Labeling

Twitter is such a wonderful source of knowledge and a great place to pick up amateur radio operating tips. I saw this post from Johnny/W5KV, talking about getting a 146.52 sticker for his truck. (146.52 MHz is the 2m National Simplex Calling Frequency.) I’ve written about these stickers here: Get Your Mobile Frequency Sticker On … Read more