A couple of posts ago, I wrote about a script that I cobbled together to pull live activator data from the POTA website and push to a console and to the Mac notifications (assuming I hit a station in a state I’m looking for). As I was working through my CW studies last night, I…
Ham radio is a hobby that has some requirements. The most significant of these is a license to operate. In order to get that license, one must take a test. And in order for there to be a test, there has to be someone to administer it. The system in the U.S. involves volunteers who…
I found myself poking at the POTA APIs yesterday and decided that it’d be neat to bang out a quick script that might tell me from a CLI (or over my Mac notifications) whether or not a state that I’m hunting on FT8 is on the air. The API is simple enough. So why not?…
Northeast Ohio has always been grey and nasty through the winter. At least that’s been the case as long as I’ve been here. There’s not really any point in being down about it. It’s the state of things. When the weekend rolls around, sitting in the house feels like the opposite of what I want…
In NE Ohio, real winter is in January and February. The world gets cold. The skies are grey. That giant orb of light in the sky that we see all summer? It fades into memory. The stuff of stories for small children. When the wind is cold and it keeps people locked into the house…
Monday was MLK Day. There was, surprisingly, nothing on the calendar for the household. No service projects. No Scouting events. Nothing. Just a cold, clear day in January. Without much thought, I decided to head out to West Branch SP – K-1999. This was the first park I tried to activate and the site of…
2023 is already underway and there’s always a strong desire to hang a new calendar and immediately start scribbling on it. Goals. Targets. Whatever the choice of words is, there seems to be a natural disposition to turning a year into an expedition. And that’s not a bad thing. Every hobby needs to have some…
The grey of the week was oppressive. People may not know it, but for Seattle’s reputation for grey skies, NE Ohio beats it for cloud cover over the course of a year. Honestly? It can get heavy after a few weeks. Especially when there’s no snow. All of that white brightens things up. It might…
It was a long bit of time off for me this holiday. I grabbed what amounted to about two weeks of time off and spent most of it with my family around the house. It was a wonderfully low-key holiday season for us. That meant that there was time to head out to the park…
2022 is in the rearview mirror. Seems like the right time to look back at the year in ham radio for KC8JC. Let’s do that, shall we? 2022 GOALS At the end of 2021, I was looking for some Stupid Arbitrary Goals for my hobby. I set four of them. Let’s see how I did….