Ham radio stuff

  said the guy in Oregon, holding up a $29.95 Baofeng handi-talkie. "Someone said you can talk to the International Space Station with one!" Well, you can send a message to the ISS with one. I saw a pretty good Youtube of someone doing it with a Yaesu FT60R once so I suppose it can be done with a Baofeng but you have to build a Yagi antenna and set the radio up for one of the digital modes and the ISS has to be well over the horizon. Still, out of the box with the 'rubber ducky' antenna your range radio to radio is probably between one and five miles across decent terrain. Of course, if you can hit a repeater the range increases but that's because you are having a repeater repeat and boost your transmission. Did I mention that you're supposed to have a license before you transmit? That thought never crossed your mind, did it? Or maybe it did and you're too lazy and/or stupid to get one. The FCC emergency clause goes only so far.  Still, they're a prett...

  A lot of DXpeditions and really heavy pileups often work split. What is a split? It means he is transmitting on one frequency and listening on another. It makes the two way traffic flow a lot better and the operator can handle a massive pileup a lot easier because the frequency he is transmitting on isn't overwhelmed by everyone and their cousin shouting on top of him. The first rule of ham radio is you listen with your ears, not your mouth. So you are spinning the dial and you hear something and get the call sign. You hit the laptop and check on the clusters and on QRZ dot com and sure enough! It's a DXPedition to Outer Slobovia! Rare DX! You throw up your call and an angry voice answers "Split!" and you ignore him and hear the DX station say "Listening up. QR Zed." You throw your call in again and someone else says "He's listening up." Again you try and hear angry voices return with "Split! He's listening up!" Undaunted you tr...

  I have always been a proponent of relaying messages because I realize that even HF has limitations. It's dependent on propagation.  There's ground wave and skywave. Groundwave is straight radio to radio direct communication where the radio waves travel along the ground. Skywave is when the signal hits the ionosphere and 'skips' and bounces back to the ground. You can be either inside or outside of the skip zone.  Enter the relay which nets use. You simply have someone in between you that has contact with you and the person you are trying to contact simply relay the message. A net I am on counts a relayed in check-in as a legitimate check in even though he could not contact net control. Most nets do this. A decade or maybe more ago I was on a certain ham radio forum and decided to organize an ECOMM drill and see how fast we could relay a message across the country to HI and give a reply back to the point of origin. On top of this all participants were supposed to get t...

  For a while the frequency was reigned by a guy in the Vancouver, BC that some said was bipolar. Anyway he was a pain in the s$$ and I've actually made a rather nice QSO with him and he bent my ear about how the troublemaker was some guy in Michigan and if I recall correctly he gave me his callsign. Anyway, I found out that someone in Michigan had been clouted with a five figure fine by the FCC. Still, everyone knew who he was and recognized his voice. He would often fill the airwaves with profanity and general vileness which we ignored. However when he started making death wishes to American troops and said things about dead GIs that crossed the line. Looking back on it I assume the GIs at Ft Lewis, WA didn't hear about it. Few GIs are hams and those that are and live on post can't just grab a military set and go on the air when they want to. Had the GIs at Ft Lewis heard about it it's pretty likely that a trio or quartet of angry privates would have taken a weekend i...

 14.313 was considered the 20 meter tuning channel for quite a while. I'll get into this later in another post. For a while it was the 20 meter dumping ground. Want to tune your rig on 20 meters with a manual tuner? Take it to 14.313. Practice CW? Go to 14.313. Anyway, briefly there was an informal CW practice net that went there and I was learning CW at the time. (CW is use it or lose it. I'd have to start over again and was never very good at it to begin with.) There were a number of standard messages sent back and forth, carefully chosen because they used almost all of the letters in the alphabet. 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs' is one because it uses all 26 letters. Anyway, some chowderhead got tired of the same old same old and had a bright idea. 'Corporal Takaki Yakazumi, IJA SB Hill 883   New Guinea. I am getting old. Send Sake and comfort girl. Long live the Emperor.' came over 14.313 in slow newbie CW.  While I didn't get all of it, ...

  All hobbies have their fair share of jerks. Get used to it. Ham radio is no exception. I licensed as a General four years after the code requirement went away and spent about 2 months as a General before I became an Extra. As with anything else, most hams were glad to have us. They welcomed new blood into what was essentially a dying hobby. CW was considered obsolete by many. Few people wanted to put the time and effort into learning code when they knew they would never really use it. Still, as to be expected there were the usual group that resented people that didn't have to take the code test and what they considered worse is that many of us were Extras!  Every so often I'd hear someone being referred to like "He's just another no code Extra ruining the hobby." If you've read much of what I have to say, I don't let too much slide. I'd often shoot back with "Yeah. One of those no code Extras that saved the hobby from extinction and having the b...