Ham Radio

[Skip Ellis]

Any hams on here? KQ4KVU

[tbeltrans]

Any hams on here? KQ4KVU

My call used to be WB0IMI, but I let my license lapse when we moved into a condo.

Tony

[DawgBone]

I was studying to take the exam when covid hit and the exams were canceled I stopped studying and never got back around to it.

I like the old boat anchors. Kinda like a good tube amp. I had a Yaesu FT-101EX but I sold it. Was hoping to get an old Hammarlund or maybe a Heathkit but I don't have any space for it right now and I was sick of stringing temporary dipole setups into the trees. The cabling gets in the way of mowing the grass.

I never did see the point of contesting but I have a buddy that went off the deep end with it, I just like to pick up redneck conversations on the 80m band and some of the international 20 and 40m band stuff, especially if there is some decent music broadcast there. I still got a Galaxy 259 so I can at pick up 11 meter bands and a Baofeng hand held 2m that works amazingly well for what I paid for it. I can't get aircraft bands though. I can see the airport from my house so it'd be fun to have a nice hand held Yaesu or something.

[jazzshrink]

Any hams on here? KQ4KVU

I wish!

[starjasmine]

Long time SWL never got my ticket. Accidentally bought a good-working-condition Hammarlund HQ180AC on ebay a few years ago ... I didn't really think I'd win the auction but, surprise .... !

Back when I was a kid, DXing 60 m was loads of fun and I QSLed ~100 countries. Now a lot of SWBC stations have shuttered (or are buying time in Okechobee) and the noise floor from digital devices is insane, even in my fairly rural area of NorCal. But it's still fun to turn on the rx and tune around on occasion.

SWLing exposed me to troves of indigenous music from all over the globe at a young age... so much of that seems to be gone now. There was a lot more local flavor in the pre-satellite, pre-internet days; music from every country now uses the same auto-tune and drum machines that everyone else uses, with the result being a disappointing homogeneity to all of the musical offerings.

On the plus side, sites like Radio Garden make streams from lots of different stations available to anyone with a computer; no skill or radio equipment necessary. Yeah, it's the difference between going to the store and going fishing :-) but if you just want a taste, try this out - I had to wade through a lot of auto-tuned pop to find Radio Dakar City from Dakar live on Radio Garden offering something like what I used to hear any given night on 60 m. (BTW, it takes a while for the stream to load, so be patient.)

And the plethora of free web-enabled SDRs is also pretty cool: click a dot on this map to be able to tune a software-defined radio (SDR) yourself.

[Jimmy blue note]

CQ CQ
When the internet is crippled, ham operators have been an important part of emergency communications as has been proven.
Who can still communicate in Morse code? Early coders, ha ha.

[Kirk Garrett]

CQ CQ
When the internet is crippled, ham operators have been an important part of emergency communications as has been proven.
Who can still communicate in Morse code? Early coders, ha ha.

I love Morse code.

I got my Tech and General licenses in December after a decades long lapse as a Novice who only a had a few HF QSOs with a friend’s rig.

Now I’m thinking about getting a dual band mobile and joining ARES, which is robust in my county, for practical reasons.

But DX’ing with CW is my real interest.

— KQ4NFS

[va3ux]

Any hams on here? KQ4KVU

VA3UX here

[RJVB]

I had an uncle who was very much into this, with all the required licenses and a couple of big antennae on the roof of their appartment building, maps in his studies etc. He was an electronics engineer so his study was a bit of an alibaba's cave for me as a kid. Once he let me hold the mic while he scanned the 27mhz CB frequencies and I pushed the button, apparently completely overpowering the ongoing conversation so much he spent the next few minutes apologising and then kicked me out. I never really got the appeal of scanning the bands to find someone to exchange some communalities with in some obscure part of the world, though.

Or maybe it laid the seeds for my current appreciation of finding internet forum/chat buddies from all over the place

What's the weather like up or down there, @KF5BOC ?

[Brian859]

Thanks for mentioning radio garden. Being of canadian decent I checked out the edges of humanity up there. In thompson manitoba they have bingo going on their lone fm station. In yellowknife northwest territories there is a guy that sounds intoxicated talking nonsense. But they apparently have a kroger store. Its relaxing.