For many of us older guys, our first experience with home brew was building a crystal radio. Incredibly simple, yet also incredibly magical, some wire a paper tube and a piece of rock suddenly sent Tiger Baseball into our headphones. From our friends at CrystalRadio.net, some accessible and fun radio…
Broadcaster and raconteur Jean Shepherd, K2ORS was an avid amateur radio enthusiast. He spoke often of the hobby on his WOR broadcasts. With thanks to Joe Levine, W8JRK, here is a link to an archive. Included in the collection is his 1985 Dayton HamVention speech where a number of MSUARC members…
Good News ! Andrew Temme and I finished installing the new windows 7 computer up in the repeater cabinet this afternoon. After a bit of reconfiguring we were able to bring up Echolink and connect to both W8UM and another repeater in Dayton. We may not have EVERYTHING configured properly, but it…
A film about radio use at the end of the Second World War. There is an interesting simulation of an AM ham radio contact at 3:08.
If you’ve ever sung in the shower and hit a note where the sound seemed to amplify, you’ve experienced resonance. Every antenna has a particular frequency on which it is “resonant”. When we transmit on a radio frequency that is resonant with the antenna, very little power is lost and…
Can radio amateurs connect their computers across a wireless network? You bet. Firing data between ham stations is as old as the Morse Code. With the advent of Packet Radio Two popular ways to do it are D-RATS and HSMM-MESH. D-RATS is a lot like what Internet Relay Chat used to…
An appreciation by Jason Feifer in Popular Mechanics.
900MHz quad-core system-on-chip, 1GB of RAM, and still just $35.00. I use the Pi to interface with my D-Star DVAP dongle and it’s been darn near bulletproof. Eager to put this baby through her paces. Here’s more from Gizmodo.
“The Amateur Radio Parity Act of 2015” — H.R.1301 — has been introduced in the US House of Representatives. The measure would direct the FCC to extend its rules relating to reasonable accommodation of Amateur Service communications to private land use restrictions. Learn more here.
Baluns. We see em in a variety of amateur radio applications. They help turn a couple of long pieces of wire into a tool that a coaxial cable can feed with radio frequency energy. But what are they? Why do we need them? And how do they work? This 1985…