Amateur Radio · VHF/UHF · Summits On The Air · Colorado Mountains · Adventure
I’ve been interested in the idea of a microphone-centric radio and wrote about it here: How About a Mic-Centric Mobile Transceiver? Shortly thereafter, I discovered that QYT has introduced a VHF/UHF ham rig that has the display and controls in the microphone (Model KT-WP12). You may want to watch the video by Tech Minds, which … Read more
Most automobiles don’t provide a lot of room for mounting ham radio transceivers. (Obviously, their design priorities are wrong!) Because of this, many ham transceivers have removable control panels that can be mounted on the dashboard and the main radio is installed somewhere else, such as under a seat. Midland radio is doing some interesting … Read more
When on a road trip, I usually monitor the 2m FM calling frequency, 146.52 MHz. For the most part, that frequency is pretty quiet but sometimes a fellow traveler, camper, SOTA activator or random ham shows up on frequency. I don’t usually bother with tuning into local repeaters as that requires frequent adjustment of the … Read more
Joyce/K0JJW and I did another activation of Mt Herman (W0C/FR-063) today. This is a repeat summit for us this year but we were looking for an easy hike not too far from home. As usual, we were just using the VHF/UHF bands for the activation. My favorite rig for this type of SOTA activation is … Read more
We recently completed a Technician License class that produced a herd of new ham radio licensees. This always leads to a discussion of what radio should I get? Often, this is centered on the idea of getting a handheld VHF/UHF radio to get started. That is a good first move. However, for many new hams … Read more
[My apologies. I fumble-fingered WordPress and published a draft version of this article that was incomplete. This is the corrected version. ] Sometime during the 20th Century, I learned that fuses (or circuit breakers) are used in electrical circuits to prevent catastrophic failure. Fuses open in response to an electrical fault that causes excessive current … Read more