Amateur Radio · VHF/UHF · Summits On The Air · Colorado Mountains · Adventure
It’s time to do one of those miscellaneous collections of drivel that spews forth from the interwebnet pipes. Some of this might even be important! Some upcoming events: ARRL June VHF QSO Party and the Colorado FM Sprint, on the weekend of June 12th. The FM Sprint runs concurrently with the ARRL contest but only … Read more
Ham radio VHF enthusiasts have been patiently waiting for the ICOM IC-9100. This HF/VHF/UHF/Satellites covers most or all of the popular amateur bands. Recently, ICOM has posted the specs and brochure on its web site. The rig has dual receivers that allow monitoring two bands at once and it is set up for full-duplex on … Read more
For the RF/microwave enthusiasts out there, you may recall the old HP Reflectometer Calculator that does conversions between SWR, Return Loss and calculated mismatch uncertainty. Well, fast forward to the 21st century and this same functionality can be found in an iPhone ap. Agilent Technologies has a free ap available on iTunes that does these … Read more
The Colorado FM Sprint is a short and simple VHF contest that runs in parallel with the ARRL June VHF QSO Party. Basically, it’s a chance to have some fun on the VHF bands for not-so-serious contesters. Sponsored by: Colorado ARES and the Colorado VHF Group (KØYB) Direct any questions to k0yb@qsl.net This contest is … Read more
We finished up the second and last day of our 2-day Ham Radio Technician License Class. The class ended with a VE test session, which was done by one of the local VE teams. We had 19 out of 21 students pass Element 2, qualifying them for a Technician Class License, for a 90% success … Read more
We’ve been looking at optimizing the performance of the D-STAR repeater here in Monument (W0TLM, 446.8875 MHz), so I’ve been searching the web for information on what other groups have uncovered. Not surprisingly, there has been some creative reverse-engineering and re-engineering of the ICOM D-STAR repeaters. Here’s a summary of some Good Stuff that I … Read more