Posts tagged 'radio'

• Building a VHF Contest Rover, Insides - July 9, 2020

  Years ago, I promised some writeups on how I was going about building a VHF contest rover. I never got around to doing that, partially because I am not any good at keeping my website up to date. In this post, I’m going to try to start taking care of that by talking about what’s on the inside of the rover. In particular, I’m going to cover the radios and radio related boxes.

• Operating from Bermuda - March 22, 2018

  From March 9 through March 14, Sarah and I were on vacation in Bermuda. This was originally supposed to be a group trip, but the crazy storms in New England forced it to be just the two of us and screwed up all our flights. The basic plan was a quick vacation to an island where I could also operate the radio as a DX station for a change.

• Building a VHF Contest Rover, Intro - March 1, 2018

  For the past couple years, Sean (WA1TE) and I have been operating as a rover in the January and September VHF contests under the callsign K1SIG/R. While the radios and antennas we’ve used have been a combination of all our stuff, we’ve been using his car for the actual roving itself. Sean’s going to be busy later this year, so I have started thinking about building my own rover. This is the first in an occassional series of posts to explain roving and how I’m going to build mine.

• 2017 New England QSO Party - May 16, 2017

  Back on May 6 and May 7 was the New England QSO Party, a radio contest where the object is for New England stations to make contacts with as many people as possible, or for non-New England stations to make contacts with as many New England stations as possible. Along with Sean (WA1TE) and David (WH6DSN), I operated from a rented house in Springfield, VT under our K1SIG club callsign.

• January VHF Contest Results - January 23, 2017

  This past weekend was the January VHF contest. WA1TE and I operated as K1SIG from my house. I knew it isn’t a very good location for VHF operations, but we were out of options and it’s hard to be a rover in New England in the winter. We’d operated in the January 2016 contest so I knew what to expect - lots of slow periods, little help from propagation, and very long distance contacts at all. I therefore set my expectations low, hoping only to beat our previous score of 1222.

• January VHF Contest - January 18, 2017

  This weekend, January 21 and 22, WA1TE and I will be operating in the January VHF contest under the call sign of K1SIG. I’ll be operating on 6m, he’ll be operating on 2m, and we’ll likely be taking turns manning the 1.25m and 70cm station. We’ve got some reasonable beams on all those bands and reasonable power on 6m and 2m. With any luck, we’ll have an amp running on one of the other two.

  We’ll be operating from my house, which is a poor location, but we are still hopeful to make a lot of contacts. My goal is to beat our previous January score of 1222 points, which should not be too difficult. If you hear us calling, please respond. We will primarily be on SSB but can probably limp through some CW contacts and hopefully some meteor scatter in the evenings.

• My SOTA Gear - November 3, 2016

  I’ve spent the entire year hiking around with my radio participating in Summits on the Air. For the most part it’s been using a little handheld radio with a handheld antenna, but I’ve recently had enough success on HF to be encouraged by the gear I’m using. I thought it might be interesting for other people to see exactly what gear I am carrying with me. And since I spend a lot of time working on lightening my backpacking load, it would be interesting to see how much all this stuff weighs too.

• Finishing the New England 4000ers - October 16, 2016

  On October 15, I headed north to Sugarloaf one more time with Sarah and Rik to finish off the New England 4000ers. I had only three left - Abraham, Spaulding, and Sugarloaf - and they’re all along one ridge so it made sense to do them as one hike. Sarah came along to help with the logistics. I had her drop Rik and me off at the Firewarden’s trailhead and we would then just hike all the way back to the Sugarloaf Mountain Hotel. That would save us having to do any weird out and back stuff.

• Lassen NP day hikes (August 26/27) - September 18, 2016

  After our backpacking trip, we spent the next five days doing much easier day hikes in and around Lassen NP. Sometimes all four of us went, and sometimes it was just one or two people. We saw a variety of things - waterfalls, summits, thermal features, and lava tubes. This post describes the last three full days we spent in the area.

• Lassen NP day hikes (August 24/25) - September 16, 2016

  After our backpacking trip, we spent the next five days doing much easier day hikes in and around Lassen NP. Sometimes all four of us went, and sometimes it was just one or two people. We saw a variety of things - waterfalls, summits, thermal features, and lava tubes. This post describes the first two days worth of activities.

• Backpacking in Lassen NP, Day 2 (August 22) - September 9, 2016

  On day two of our backpacking trip through Lassen NP, Lon and I got up early to do an activation of a peak near our campsite. We then met back up with Sarah at the campsite, packed up, and hiked past several more lakes and through a big burned area, then down through a long valley before hitting Snag Lake. This desolate looking lake is on the east side of the park. We hiked along its shore for a mile or two before reaching our campsite just at its end. Along the way, we also changed our plans for the trip.

• 2015 in radio - December 22, 2015

  At the end of 2014, I wrote down a whole bunch of goals for my main hobbies, in order to motivate myself to do them more often. Since we’re at the end of 2015 now, it’s a pretty good time to look back and see how well I did. Over the past several posts I’m going to do that, one hobby at a time. Since I’m unlikely to do anything with the radio the rest of the year, I’ll talk about that first. I’m also going to mention what I have planned for the upcoming year.

• Fall 2015 hiking roundup - December 9, 2015

  I keep meaning to write in depth about all the hiking I’ve been doing this fall, but two things stopped me. First, I wanted to be able to link to pictures but I want to set up my new photo browser (which means setting up a new server) first. Second, after a couple went by without a writeup the backlog really got big and it became much harder to get the motivation. So instead of doing anything deep here, I’m just going to give real quick recaps of what I have been up to. There’s a lot more planned for the winter so I need to knock out the reports of these to make way for more exciting posts soon.

• Hike and activation of Rose Mountain - October 31, 2015

  I didn’t have a lot of time for a hike on Saturday, because we needed to be down at David’s house in the afternoon to help with antenna raising and passing out candy. Thus I needed to find something local and quick to do. I’m also a little bored of the usual Wapack peaks, so I had to figure out somewhere new to go. For reference, I figured I might as well use the Summits On The Air maps to find somewhere a little more obscure that I could also get some radio done from. Rose Mountain in Lyndeborough fit the bill.

• My first Summits On The Air activation - October 21, 2015

  It’s fun to combine hobbies. Recently, I’d been thinking about doing more portable radio operation and with the heel injury I thought it was the perfect time to get out and take a handheld radio on a quick nearby hike to see who I could contact. Of course, there’s already an organized group that does this, and it’s called Summits On The Air, complete with spotting and awards and rules and lists of peaks. So I joined a few Facebook groups, created a couple accounts, installed SOTA Spotter on my phone, and picked my summit.

• September 2015 VHF Contest - September 23, 2015

  The weekend of September 12 & 13 was the annual September VHF radio contest, which is one of a handful of radio contests I like to participate in every year. For those who don’t know, the VHF contests take place on the ham bands of 6m, 2m, 1.25m, 70cm, and on up all the way to light. How it works is that you try to make as many contacts as you can, and you can work the same person once on every band you’ve got in common. Then, the world is divided up into these little 1 degree by 2 degree grids. Your final score is roughly the number of contacts you make multiplied by the number of unique grids you make a contact in.