Mixed Signals from Yaesu

This just in from the Things That Make You Go Hmmm Department: the amateur radio portion of Yaesu splits from Mother Motorola while the land mobile portion stays. This is right on top of an announcement that Yaesu will pursue a digital amateur radio offering based on land mobile technology (i.e., definitely not D-STAR). The … Read more

Don’t Get Stuck On 2 Meters

When I first got started in amateur radio (many years ago), one of the engineers that I was working with at a summer job told me “Don’t get stuck on 2 Meter FM”. At the time I was a college student and felt lucky enough to have 1) found time to pass my Novice exam, … Read more

ARRL 10 Meter Contest

Usually I don’t focus on the ARRL 10 Meter contest, especially when the solar activity has been so low. However, band conditions have really picked up and 10 Meters is alive and kicking. We have quite a few new Technicians that are discovering the wonder of worldwide HF propagation with even a modest station. I … Read more

A Pretty Good List From K3NG

K3NG reposted one of his classic articles Things I Wish I Knew When I Was A Young Radio Artisan. Here’s a few items from the list: With antennas, it’s not about the feet and inches (or meters), think in terms of wavelength. Don’t worry about the orientation of a dipole when it’s less than a … Read more

What’s a Country?

Recently on Google Plus there was a discussion of what qualifies as a separate country in the amateur radio world. The confusion point was that Alaska was showing up in logging software as a “country”. It turns out is is both a country and a state. The generally accepted countries list is established by the … Read more