A Purpose For Amateur Radio

Imagine, you’re in an earthquake zone and you just had an earthquake… the internet and cell phones are out, power is spotty… or… Imagine you live in an hurricane prone area you just had a hurricane roll through… 95% of the cell towers were destroyed, downed trees have knocked out power over a wide area … Read more

Security is hard

Recent and not-so-recent revelations in the online world show lots of breaches in security in corporate and government spaces. It’s easy to figure out if you’ve been pwned at haveibeenpwned.com. What’s hard is securing stuff that’s been leaked. Take, for instance, LastPass., I was an all-in user of LastPass. Then came their breaches… plural. I … Read more

Yaesu FT-857D

I’m going to attempt to work my 857D into my truck. I last had it in a Ford Escape that I traded for a Jeep. I’ve owned 2 vehicles since then over 11 years. I have located everything that goes with it and also bought an MFJ-1927Y screwdriver controller for it to control the Lil’ … Read more

HamClock

I find it amazing how well 1 watt at digital modes propagate like JS8 compared to 5 watts and even 100 watts of SSB and will be presenting a talk at my local radio club on how I use HamClock to monitor propagation conditions. It really is capable of much more than I use it … Read more

QRP Radio Power Dissipation

In the spirit of experimentation, I wanted to find out exactly how much power my QRP radios consume. I’ve had a Yaesu FT-818ND for several years now. It’s built like a tank but fragile at the same time. I bought a set of rails for it a while back to protect the knobs and the … Read more