Amateur Radio · VHF/UHF · Summits On The Air · Colorado Mountains · Adventure
The Summits On The Air (SOTA) program offers a good set of tools for chasing and activating summits. Outside of the SOTA program, many different outdoor and hiking apps are also useful for planning and doing activations. The tools I use have changed over time, so here’s an inventory of what I am currently using. … Read more
Many of you already know about this wonderful alert tool: HamAlert. From the HamAlert website: HamAlert is a system that allows you to get notifications when a desired station appears on the DX cluster, the Reverse Beacon Network, SOTAwatch, POTA, WWFF Spotline, or PSK Reporter. No need to keep checking these resources manually if you’re … Read more
I’ve been whining about the fact that for many years the 2m FM calling frequency, 146.52 MHz, was prohibited for use in VHF contests and Field Day. See The One Frequency You Should Never Use on Field Day. Well, the ARRL removed this restriction in 2015, so that issue has been resolved. The CQ WW … Read more
At first, I was just looking around on the web for some simple Rules of Thumb that compare the weak-signal performance of commonly used analog and digital modulation types. I was mostly focused on FT8 and FT4 but I also wanted to compare SSB and CW. I failed to find a simple comparison of these … Read more
Sometimes, I just need a reason to get on the air. Specific operating goals can help with this, whatever form they take, including operating awards. One of the first awards I earned many years ago was Worked All States (WAS). The mixed WAS is not that difficult because you can use any of the HF … Read more
Many “emergency frequency lists” showing up on the internet are a hodgepodge of frequencies scraped from various sources and assembled into what looks like a credible list. Most of these frequencies are not authorized for use by the general public. Some of these frequencies are useful, but too many are misleading and perhaps even dangerous. … Read more