Ham Radio . Magnum Experimentum
Antennas, experiments, engineering and other articles of interest to radio folks.
I have experimented with Radio Mobile for a few years. If you have not tried using it, you should. It is a free RF link analysis program that uses geographic elevation data to help you determine the obstacles between two radio stations.
The details of this program’s capabilities are too numerous to mention here so please visit the web site here…
I made my very first Olivia QSO tonight. It was a bit daunting, but I took the time to study a little about the standard, already had MixW rigged up with the Olivia DLL, listened around a bit on 20 meters then 40, figured out where to call CQ and just did it.
It was not even two minutes before a ham came back to my Olivia 16/500 call on one of the 40 meter calling frequencies.
During our Sunday night Tech Net in Northern Virginia one of the participants described a 140 watt amplifier he just finished building for use on the HF bands.
My immediate thought was “Hmmm, he already has a 100 watt style typical HF radio. Why does he need something that does 140 watts?”
The I remembered he also has a QRP rig which generates the typical 5 watts or so and this linear amplifier allows this QRP rig to be just like the typical 100 watt radios when you need or want it.
The amplifier concept comes from a company called…
Solar energy from photo-voltaic (PV) panels is a great thing to show off at the ARRL Field Day, but economic realities and lengthy ROI periods continue to make it financially unsound for home use.