Ham radio really is a hobby made up of hobbies. It’s an onion and the more one peels, the more there is to peel. And there is no shortage of areas to explore. I got my license just about a year ago – I took my Technician exam on my dad’s birthday – and an…

This is the story of a novice, rather than that of an amateur. I think I mentioned at one point that I had a dipole in the attic that runs both 20m and 40m with coils. I’ve been listening in and a little shy with the mic. The few times that I did reach out,…

This weekend, a couple of things came across my feed that were pretty cool when it comes to learning Morse Code. I will readily admit that I’ve been slacking on that because life is busy and I wasn’t able to plug in for 15 minutes a day while my mind was fresh. It’s an excuse,…

When I started listening to the Ham Radio Workbench podcast they were on quite a tear about DMR. I wasn’t really sure what it was, but as I listened, I got more and more into it. I have an ICOM 7100 that has D-Star but I’d not even played with that at all. The idea got…

Well, this is better late than never, I guess. Back when I got my ticket, I decided that I’d take a trip to Hamvention out in Dayton (sorry, Xenia). Being an Ohio native with a dad who is into this stuff, I was well aware of the magnitude of the event and how big the…

No matter what else you learn to do, if you’re going to mess around with building kits, learn to unsolder components. You’re gonna read that resistor code wrong eventually. It uh…happened to a friend of mine this weekend.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, my dad gave me a great gift. He handed me the KD1JV Code Trainer from QRPGuys. I was able to solder it up in about 30 minutes and most of that time was spent finding a capacitor that found its way into the minijack. With that mystery solved, my favorite little…

I took and passed the General License test on 16-Nov-2017 at the Community Ambulance Association of Ambler. So now I can get my 20m stuff going! Still trying to find minutes to put together my BITX40 radio. I’ve got a pretty cool case that I found via a blog here. I should note that for…

I received my Technician license on 25-Sep-2017 with a perfect score on my exam. My first contact was with my dad, AC8NT, about a week later. Lots more to come!