Amateur Radio · VHF/UHF · Summits On The Air · Colorado Mountains · Adventure
August 3 & 4, 2019 Saturday and Sunday www.ham14er.org Amateur Radio operators from around Colorado will be climbing many of Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains and Summits On The Air (SOTA) peaks to set up amateur radio stations in an effort to communicate with other radio amateurs across the state and around the world. Join in on … Read more
Joyce/K0JJW and I were planning a trip to Alaska to visit several of the national parks. We had some time available while in Fairbanks to do some SOTA activations. We were traveling very light, so we took minimal SOTA gear: a pair of VHF/UHF handhelds and simple antennas. We used my newly-fashioned antenna mount on … Read more
My Summits On The Air (SOTA) activation of Pikes Peak (W0C/FR-004) on June 20th qualified me for Mountain Goat, using only the VHF/UHF bands. Mountain Goat requires 1000 activation points using the SOTA activation point system. I’ve been working toward this goal for quite a while. I was doing mountaintop VHF activations before SOTA was … Read more
For Summits On The Air (SOTA), I’ve been using just the VHF/UHF ham bands, with the 2m band being the most popular. For most activations, I use a 3-element Arrow II yagi antenna that has a gain of about 6 dBd. Sometimes that extra gain makes the difference between completing a contact or not. Omnidirectional … Read more
A Handheld Transceiver (HT) is a convenient, compact all-in-one wireless device for FM operating on the VHF/UHF bands. HTs are sometimes referred to as a Shack On The Belt. There’s a lot to like about a transceiver that has wide frequency range, built-in antenna and power source. The attractiveness of these devices coupled with a … Read more
Sometimes radio amateurs suggest that phonetics are not needed on VHF FM. (See examples here and here.) Sometimes it even sounds like it’s a bad thing to use phonetics on FM. It is inefficient and slows things down. I can see the logic behind this because with decent signal strength, demodulated FM audio is usually … Read more