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 activated my second Parks On The Air park early this week. I managed to work from US-0712 Manassas Battlefield Park for about an hour and a half before other visitors began to arrive and encroach upon my antenna deployment. It was my second outing with the new Wolf River Coils Silver Bullet Take-It-Along antenna kit that I recently purchased. I’m very pleased with it and see it becoming my go-to antenna for most of my operating outings. You can read about my POTA activation at US-0712 in an article I published earlier this week.
I still have not deployed my recently-built end-fed halfway wire antenna which uses the 49:1 UNUN kit sold in the ARRL online store. I did, however, finally get myself a quality multimeter (and this really nifty protective case for it) and validated my previous bench testing of the UNUN. I’m confident that I assembled the kit properly and will be able to get the wire antenna tuned for use on 40 through 10 meters once I get a chance to actually deploy it. I was hoping to get around to doing so this weekend, but this weekend was a scheduled monthly maintenance weekend so I wasn’t able to enjoy the entire weekend off of work as I normally would have. Next weekend’s weather forecast is looking favorable, so maybe I’ll finally get it done then.
I’ve continued my Morse code learning efforts and CW skills practice. I’m using Learn CW Online daily to gain Instant Character Recognition (ICR) skills and I feel like I’m progressing pretty well so far. Out of 40 lessons that are available for character recognition, I’m on lesson 21. I’m learning characters at 25 WPM with 8 WPM Farnsworth spacing. I’ve been placed in an upcoming CWOps CW Academy cohort and I’m currently awaiting start date and scheduling information to be shared with the class. As yet another way to keep myself motivated to earn proficiency with CW, I joined the Americas Chapter of the FISTS CW Club as member #22970.
A fellow Vienna Wireless Society member shared an interesting find this week on the club’s message reflector. NA5B, an amateur in the Washington DC metropolitan area is sharing their software-defined radio online. If you don’t watch out, you’ll end up spending a lot of time just tuning around and listening to all the conversations and some of the shortwave broadcast stations. I thought it would be a good resource for me to be able to practice copying CW conversations since I’m not able to get a good antenna deployment here at home that allows me to scan around the different bands and communicate easily. NA5B provides a web page where they share other WebSDR sites. I haven’t verified all of the links, but those few that I did visit worked well. Have a look at those when you get a chance.
That’s all I’ve got for you this week. The weather is warming up and staying warm, so I am hopeful that I’ll get myself out and about more often and on the radio. Perhaps I’ll chat with you sometime on the air soon.
73 everyone,
Matthew K2MAS
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