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.
Happy New Year everyone! Welcome to the first issue of the newsletter of the year.
I’m inching ever closer to getting my FT-891 and ATAS-120a antenna installed into my car. I’ve had to try several different mounting options for the control head and none have yet provided the perfect solution. I’ve got parts on order that will hopefully get me 100% there, but they are not expected to arrive until late in the upcoming week. I’ve already started on the installation write-up for that, so stay tuned.
Perhaps it is a bit cliché, but I have set myself a New Year’s resolution related to amateur radio. I have been a member of the ARRL since I was first licensed back in 2014 and was receiving the QST magazine each month until they stopped printing them (unless you specifically asked for the print version). As such, I have almost 10 years of QST magazines stuffed into a box that I’ve decided to read from oldest to most recent by year’s end. Unfortunately, during my non-active years on the air, I received the magazine but I’m pretty sure I never read them. I may have thumbed through them from time to time, but none of them stand out in my memory. For whatever reason, I kept them all. Now that I’m more active in the hobby, perhaps the wealth of knowledge in each issue will be invaluable in helping me progress deeper into the world of amateur radio. That’s my hope anyway.
In case you missed it, Jason, over at Ham Radio 2.0, has been working with the folks at GigaParts to host “Let’s Make A Deal” events while he live streams the event along with some other well-known ham personalities. There were several of these events in 2025 and I hope they continue. They recently had one just before the new year began and I couldn’t help but take advantage of possibly getting some needed items at a discount. If you missed any of the past events, follow Ham Radio 2.0 on Youtube and also get on GigaParts’ mailing list. I only learned about the most recent event from a marketing email they sent me telling me when the event was taking place.
Most of the new stuff I purchased will help me out with some soldering projects that I hope to tackle here in the new year. I would like to get into experimenting with some Arduino builds for gadgets that could be helpful in the shack or just in general around the house. I’m not much of a programmer and my soldering skills could use some work, so I’m sure it will all be a great learning experience.
I’ve also got a backlog of blog post topics that I want to try and tackle. I jotted down topics of interest over the last year that I’d like to delve deeper into and share what I’d learned, but then found that I kept adding more to that list before I could find the time to get the previous items off of the list. The FT-891 mobile installation was one of those, so it would seem I’m actually making progress. Ha ha.
I guess I should go ahead and get started on that then. I hope everyone made it into the New Year just fine and that you all have a bright outlook on things as we get moving toward 2027.
73 everyone,
Matthew K2MAS
K2MAS.net 