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
Joyce/K0JJW and I have been doing Parks On The Air (POTA), in addition to our normal Summits On The Air (SOTA) activations. Sometimes we do both simultaneously. (See More on SOTA and POTA.) SOTA will probably continue to be our top priority because, well, you just can’t beat operating from the summit of a mountain. … 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
Decibels are commonly used in electronic communications to describe and compare signal levels. I’ve often heard that one dB is considered to be the smallest change that a typical person can detect by ear. I recently came across this website audiocheck.net that is set up to generate different audio tones and to do a blind … 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