Amateur Radio · VHF/UHF · Summits On The Air · Colorado Mountains · Adventure
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
We had a great time going after the W0C 10-10-10 SOTA Challenge. (See 2021 Colorado SOTA and 14er Event ) For activators, the objective was to activate 10 summits higher than 10k feet in 10 days. It turned out that some previous commitments would not allow us to do 10 days of activating, so we … Read more
Last weekend we held the Colorado 14er Event (Aug 7 and 8), the annual mountaintop event in Colorado. A group of us used this weekend as an opportunity to make 1.2 GHz (23 cm) Summits On The Air (SOTA) contacts: K0NR, K0JJW, KM4PEH, K5RHD, W0ADV, KL7IZW, W0RW, KC5RW, and K0BEJ. Many of the 1.2 GHz … Read more
Lately, I’ve been talking with people in search of basic radio communications for their friends or family. They end up talking to me because someone steered them to ham radio as a solution and I teach ham radio license classes. Of course, I am happy to pull them into the wonderful ham radio world but … Read more
The Summits On The Air (SOTA) program originated in the United Kingdom but has propagated to most countries around the world. The program came to Colorado on May 1st, 2010 with Steve/WGØAT sending a CQ from Mount Herman, just west of Monument. Today, the SOTA program in Colorado (called WØC-SOTA) is very active with roughly … Read more
A perpetual ham radio question is always which antenna is best? I have several different antennas and antenna configurations for working VHF SOTA and decided to do some comparisons. To test out some of our 2m SOTA antennas, Joyce/K0JJW and I went to Eagle Rock (W0C/SP-113) with an elevation of 9710 feet. I did the … Read more