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 hope everyone had a great week this week. I know I did. I recently purchased a Mini 1.3 OLED ZUMspot hotspot from a fellow Vienna Wireless Society member and got that up and running here at home using Pi-Star. I had zero knowledge of how these digital hotspots function and even less knowledge on how to configure one to make it work. However, having an affinity toward IT technology, I was certain I could get it figured out given enough time. And after several hours spread across two days, I managed to get this hotspot set up and configured for connecting me to the YSF reflector network with my Yaesu FT-70DR handheld. I’m thinking of doing an article on how to set the ZUMspot up with Pi-Star sometime soon.
There is still quite a bit to learn about using the ZUMspot to communicate with other hams around the world. To help with that, I bought one of Andrew Barron’s (ZL3DW) Radio Today titles Work the World with System Fusion with hopes that the insights within will help me get a better handle on what I’m doing with the ZUMspot.
I made my first in-person appearance at a club function this week when I attended our annual Spring picnic that I spoke briefly about in a previous posting. I was pretty excited when I successfully located one of two hidden foxes in the fox hunt event. That was so fun that I’ve decided that I will be building a home-brew directional antenna in the very near future. Doing any radio direction finding with a rubber ducky antenna on an HT is not easy.
I’m looking forward to the upcoming week as I begin the CWops CW Academy CW training course. I’m participating in the CW Fundamental level class which will hopefully get me up to speed on my CW copy speed and sending accuracy. The class is eight weeks in length and includes two remote sessions per week attended by a CWops Advisor and the handful of students participating in the class. The rest of each week is spent working through drills and practice homework that each student completes on their own or together if they wish to form a study group of sorts.
Have a great upcoming week everyone.
73,
Matthew K2MAS
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