The Hobby of Hobbies Strikes Again! I can’t remember exactly when, but there was a point after I got my ticket when I started to see that all of these really cool kits for ham radio enthusiasts were practically buried in 3d printing. The last thing I needed was another pile of equipment, so I…
Freeze Your Acorns Off Each year, my local club hosts a QRP event at Fred Fuller Park in Kent, Ohio. It was the first event the club ever held and they’ve kept that tradition alive. Part of it is wearing Hawaiian shirts to thumb our collective noses at Mother Nature during an outdoor operating event…
The Park Cuyahoga Valley National Park has always been a special place. I spent a good amount of time in my youth at Camp Manatoc which is inside of the park borders. I also hiked and hung around in Virginia Kendall Park which contains The Octagon and Ledges areas where I did most of my…
The OSPOTA logs were collected and the QSOs counted. I didn’t do too badly given the issues that I had that day. The results put me in the lower middle of the single operator low power category in a park. I can’t complain about that. I think I can do much better next time around….
So it’s starting to look like I only ever go to one spot. That’s not really the case, but I am trying to get the Repeat Offender Activator award for Cuyahoga Valley National Park – K-0020. There will continue to be posts of this park with a few scattered in from other places in upcoming…
My family decided that we would take our camper on its first big vacation trip and that our destination would be the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. My last trip up that way was many, many years ago, but I remembered it as being beautiful and quiet. It’s still beautiful and still very quiet. Our plan…
The Triangle Lake Bog State Nature Preserve [K-9439] is only a few miles from my house. In fact, it’s not too far from the Kent Bog that I activated the previous weekend. I’ve had this one on the list of places that are close and could be worked from the trail or the parking lot….
As is often the case, my dad sent me a text message as I was sitting around with my radio and put an idea in my head. It was a fairly simple idea and he was just trying to be helpful. But there went 90 minutes of poking at various bits of tech. I’ve been…
Not for nothing, but I assembled a sunclock with a Raspberry Pi and a touchscreen. It’s not particularly complex, but it makes for a nice piece on my desk. I also use the Pi for serving files and other odd jobs. It’s great piece of tech and I’m not sure why any self-respecting nerd would…
A few good things happened over the Thanksgiving holiday. One of them was that my dad came to visit. Not really a surprise as that’s how it goes every year. But this year, he brought his antenna analyzer and we got down to business with my 20m/40m dipole. It’s the same antenna I had some…