Amateur Radio

Ok, Ok, you’re right. It’s a new toy and I wanted to show it off. You’re absolutely right. But I learned some things and can do better on my next wire antenna.

Grand knows his stuff – thank you, Sir!

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.