Amateur Radio

The tip of the soldering iron I tried to use is too big - it bridges all five wires at once. I should’ve stopped and bought a smaller tip but, no, I had to go ahead and try. So now the right-most two of the bottom five are soldered permanently together. Copper braid and solder suckers have failed to clear the bridge.

The several pink and clear baggies hold the several dozen parts. If you click on the image for a bigger version, look in the lower pink baggie in its lower left corner. You may be able to see a tiny black square. That’s an integrated circuit with 10 separate connections, each of which must be carefully soldered to the circuit board, and without “bridging” any of the pins to another.

In the previous sections, we eavesdropped on a live conversation between two ham stations, one in Windsor Ontario and the other in Venezuela on the northern coast of South America. And I mentioned that while you’ll find hams of all ages working the bands at all hours of day or night, it’s also true that the majority of them tend to be older gentlemen.

In the first part of this post, we had a quick look at a conversation taking place between ham radio stations in Ontario Canada and Venezuela where I just happened to be in the right place, Phoenix Arizona, to “hear” both of them.

I’m running my ham radio that uses the computer to do a lot of the work.

While there are several ASCII to Morse code translators out there, I haven’t seen the encoding used herein. It is slightly denser than most and should work nicely in machines with a tight memory constraint.

I made my first contact yesterday after many years.

I ran an End-Fed Half Wave (EFHW) as a vertical up the side of a tall palm tree using the rope and pulley installed recently while having the trees trimmed.

One of my passions is experimenting with antennas, wire antennas for HF to be precise. I want to be able to improvise and adapt to the situation at hand whether I’m at home, traveling on business, or hiking in the desert or deep forest.

I’m using PC board to construct some custom enclosures. The materials and construction techniques will be the topic of a future posting here.

My wife and I live in Phoenix Arizona. Our house is situated on a nearly square 1960-sized residential lot. I mention the year because city lots have shrunk in the past couple of years and our 100x105 foot property might seem large in some areas these days.