AmateurRadio.com

Greetings AmateurRadio.com readers!  I have not written in quite awhile, so I feel the need to catch up a bit.  I’ve had so much going on lately that I just had to prioritize what time I have left at the end of the day.  I hope to be posting again on a more regular basis.

First of all, I want to mention that KD2CHE and I tied the knot back in October, on a cliff overlooking Lake Tahoe, on a beautiful (and warm thankfully) day in Incline Village, NV.  We were quite literally a stones throw from California.  The rest of our trip out west was great, including visits to two Silicon Valley surplus shops: Weird Stuff Warehouse, and Halted Supply Company (HSC), as well as HRO in Sunnyvale.  We even had a special tour of LucasFilms/Arts/ILG courtesy of some great friends with connections.  On the plane, on the way back, while leafing through a copy of Monitoring Times I purchased at HRO, I noticed that in an article about Ham Radio Kit Building, Kirk Kleinschmidt mentioned my Amateur Radio Kit Roundup as the source for info on kit building.  While it was a nice surprise, it also got me thinking that I needed to make the guide more accessible.  I will still post the changes here, but as a link to the guide’s new URL: RadioKitGuide.com.  For now it’s just a link to the page at my blog, but will evolve into a full wiki-style site in the near future.

My trusty HTX-10 has been busy these couple of months, logging calls to Alaska, Namibia, Croatia, New Mexico, Colorado, and California to name a few.  Mostly from the Crab Meadow Beach here on Long Island, but the Alaska contact was mobile!   A new addition to the collection is an Atlas 210X HF rig.  This was a holiday present from my better half.  After a couple of months of just listening, I finally put up a 35 foot random wire, and picked up an MFJ 941-D VersaTuner so that I could try and transmit.  It’s very close quarters where we live, so I’m limited in antenna choices, and have to worry about disturbing the neighbors (well, any more than they are already disturbed/disturbing).  I found out earlier in the week, that the setup seems to be very functional on 20 meters, and have talked to Mexico, and Florida so far.  I’m hoping for some good 10 and 15 conditions this weekend so that I can try it out up there.  I’m going to add a counterpoise to the setup and see if it helps me tune up on 40.  80 is out of the question for now, as I seem to obliterate my TV speakers and KD2CHE’s computer monitor when I even try to tune up.  My 5-cent 2 meter dipole has also been working well.  I’ll cover that in a later post.

Transmitter hunting has been pretty good, with the XYL and I usually finding the transmitter quickly, and rarely last.  What’s interesting about that is we are the only team in our hunting club that operates without a doppler.  I also will write a future post on our technique, which in our last hunt, guided us to the bunny way ahead of our technologically superior friends.  Unfortunately, as we arrived at the site, I assumed that we might have been wrong, due to the fact that there were no other cars from the hunters present.  Next time I won’t put my assumptions before my instincts.  In the end, KD2CHE was the one that actually found the box, by using her eyes, while a bunch of us wandered around the woods with our equipment.

That’s all for now.  Maybe I’ll catch one of you on HF this weekend.  73’s !

–Neil, W2NDG

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