Another week of amateur radio has expired. Expired Ham, get it? 🙂
Welcome to another issue of Expired Ham, a weekly newsletter where I discuss the ways I participated in the amateur radio hobby this week.
I did not make it out to Winterfest, which is an annual hamfest hosted by the Vienna Wireless Society but, I still had a lot of amateur radio-related fun this week.
I made a trip down to the local Ham Radio Outlet earlier this week to purchase a new radio. I like the Yaesu FT-891 well enough, but while it’s often used as a portal HF rig and does a great job at that, I wanted some more bells and whistles. There are a lot of potential upgrade candidates out there, from the wildly popular ICOM IC-7300 to the Yaesu FT-991A. I just recently spent some money on a nice Heil headset with a dynamic microphone element which from what I understand, is not compatible with ICOM radios. So, while the IC-7300 would probably be a great radio, it had to fall a few places down the list of potential purchases. I toyed with the idea of having an all-mode all-band radio in the FT-991A but after comparing it to the Yaesu FT-710, I couldn’t pull the trigger on the FT-991A. I rarely use any of the local repeaters and as much as I’d like to try out working some satellites, I couldn’t justify the extra $300 or so for the FT-991A over the FT-710.
The Yaesu FT-710 HF/50MHz all-mode transceiver crosses all the boxes on my list at the moment. The FT-710 is a true SDR, has an internal antenna tuner, has a real-time spectrum scope with waterfall display, and is smaller than the FTdx10, weighs about 3 lbs lighter than the FTdx10, and is about $500 cheaper than the FTdx10 while sharing some of the same technology. I ended up buying the Yaesu FT-710 without the AESS speaker.
I continued my Morse code practice this week. I’m patiently waiting to attend a few weeks of the CWOps Academy CW training course. My goal is to become proficient enough to copy/send CW at 25+ WPM. I posted an article earlier this week to catalog some of the resources I’m using in my study efforts. You can find that here if you’re interested. I also talked my cousin, W4ISB, into buying a VBand adapter so that he and I could practice our CW on the VBand site until we’re proficient enough to operate on-air.
Now that we are starting to have a bit of warmer weather, I need to start preparing all of my radio bags and boxes for easy deployment outdoors. I have an End-Fed Half Wave antenna kit that I still need to assemble and get tuned and I need to find a way to carry around my new Yaesu FT-710 radio.
I don’t really know enough about the topic, but from what I gather from some of the space weather tracking web sites, we’ve not had great HF conditions this week. According to NOAA’s radio communications site, we’re experiencing a G2 geomagnetic storm. Hopefully conditions improve soon so that I can play around with this new radio a bit more. For now, I guess I’ll just read through The Radio Today Guide to the Yaesu FT-710 so that I can get the most out of this radio once conditions improve.
That’s all I’ve got for this week.
73 DE K2MAS
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