Another week of amateur radio has expired. Expired Ham, get it? 🙂
I thought I’d try out an idea that I’ve seen other amateur radio bloggers do, which is post an article discussing how they participated in the radio hobby over the course of the preceding period of time. As a way to possibly keep me motivated to stay active within the ham radio hobby, I thought this would be a worthwhile endeavor of my own. Thus, you’re reading the inaugural edition of Expired Ham.
For a while now, I’ve been interested in finding a local amateur radio club to join that would provide me with opportunities to enhance my technical knowledge of the radio hobby. One such candidate is the Vienna Wireless Society based in the middle of Fairfax county, Virginia. I attended their monthly club meeting a couple of Fridays ago via Zoom. I had already perused the club’s website before attending the meeting and found a website that seems regularly updated with information about upcoming events and importantly, information about club projects. The club has a dedicated section to cover the projects their “Maker Team” is working on, although it seems this area of the site hasn’t been kept regularly updated. Even so, the list of their past projects (QRP transceiver builds, antenna builds) piqués my interest. I was happy to learn that the club stays active in the maker space as they mentioned a current project related to high altitude radio via balloons. Given all the recent air travel incidents, I think I’ll stay away from sending anything into the air other than radio waves for now. I’ll be attending the club’s Winterfest hamfest next weekend.
In the last week, I’ve made several contacts on FT8. None on SSB. I’m using my Yaesu FT-891 and Chameleon CHA-FLOOP-3.0 antenna to run 10 to 25 Watts digital while indoors. Since I’m antenna-ly challenged, having a multi-band antenna like this magnetic loop has been a godsend. I don’t have a power supply for the FT-891, so I’m running the rig from a LiFePo battery.
A week or two ago, I purchased an iambic paddle (link), an electronic keyer (link), and the VBand USB adapter (link click on the store tab). My goal was to learn Morse Code and become a CW Operator someday. I’ve used a number of learning tools for both sending and receiving. First of which is the MorseMania mobile app that I installed on my iPhone and iPad. MorseMania lets you learn the Morse alphabet for free and for $5 to $9, you can get extra features to end up with a well-rounded learning environment. I’ve also been using the Learn CW Online site (link) to practice my receiving skills. Using both of these tools, I feel confident in my alphabet and number sending skills at between 15 to 18 words per minute, though my spacing is inconsistent between characters sometimes. My receiving skills need some serious practice as there is a large delta between how well I can send versus how well I can copy. To work on bringing those two skills together, I’m using the VBand USB adapter to connect my paddle to my computer so that I can use it in conjunction with the VBand website from Ham Radio Solutions (link). The adapter also lets me connect my paddle to my iPad so that I can use it in conjunction with another app called Morse-It, which provides sending and receiving practices of different types. For any of you who remember Wordle, someone built a Morse practice version called Morsle (link) that allows 21 attempts to guess the day’s word. The word is given in Morse beginning at 40 WPM and for every few playbacks, the WPM is decremented by 5. It’s been a fun exercise in accurate copy, though I’ve yet to get the word correctly guessed with only one try.
I want to talk a bit more about the VBand site as I have been really pleased with my experience so far. The platform was devised by Byon Garrabrant N6BG and a friend some years ago as a way to practice their CW skills without having to deploy a full-on radio station. With some programming skills and web application design ingenuity, the two of them came up with VBand, the Virtual CW Band. Watch an interview where Byon discusses the platform on Red Summit RF’s Youtube channel (link). I cannot recommend the platform enough for anyone wanting to learn to communicate via CW. -.-. --- -- . / --- -. / --- ...- . .-. / .- -. -.. / ... .- -.-- / .... . .-.. .-.. --- / -...-.-
That’s all I’ve got for this issue. I think I’ll plan on new Expired Ham issues being posted every Sunday. Seems doable. Let’s see if I make myself out to be a liar. .... .. / .... .. / ...-.-
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