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’m not a New Years Resolutions kind of a guy, but I do keep a running list of goals that I review every month. It’s a habit I got into years ago, and while it’s rather silly, I do it anyway. So as I was thinking about goals and radio, a neat blog post dropped…
Portable operation has been a lot of fun for me since the IC-705 showed up in my shack. It’s a really great QRP rig and I have had a wonderful time getting out and making contacts. One of the things that I’ve found while messing around at parks or on vacation is that it would…
Welcome to the new site! It has all of the content from the old KC3JXQ site but with my updated callsign as the domain. It was interesting to apply for and get a vanity callsign. I learned a great deal about the FCC licensing system and a pile of other little things that I will…
Working closely with technology for an extended period of time has colored my views on computing. I’ve gone from full-on, build it all myself or die to using whatever works reliably and jettisoning anything that fails. I can trace the completion of that transition to the point where I had a little baby boy to…
I’ve been struggling with the Go-Box concept for a while now. I’m trying to balance what I *might* do with what I’m *going* to do. And what I’m *going* to do probably 99% of the time when I’m out and about with HF is operate from my Jeep. That means that I will either be…
This really is a hobby made up of hobbies. And as is almost always the case, I have found ways to complicate things and tread on ground that either is seldom traveled or more easily avoided for most. See, I used to do a lot of audio editing and recording on GNU/Linux based systems back…