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.
The ice has finally mostly somewhat melted away from the snow/ice storm we had several weeks ago. I knew I shouldn’t have left the antenna wire laying on the deck as the snow fell. Lesson learned. While I can finally move my car from its parking space, there is still a large sheet of ice that covers the deck floor. This weekend was a long weekend here in the U.S. with Monday being a federal holiday that my employer observes. I chipped away at the ice covering my antenna wire enough to free it finally. We’ve had few of those as of late. Mostly lots of high winds and if not that, then steady breezes strong enough to make me weary about the integrity of my carbon fiber antenna mast when extended. Luckily, the day was nice and one of the warmest we’ve had in a long time. I stuck the wire back up into the air and decided to test it out a bit with, get this, a bit of FT8! I know! I’m just as surprised as you are.
I hadn’t done anything on air outside of CW since the first half of 2025. Since buying a Windows laptop so I could use N1MM+ for contesting operations, I decided to set up WSJT-X on it. The process was easy-peasy, but probably only because I had to spend days getting things set up on a MacBook already.
FT8 hasn’t changed. It’s still a rather boring mode, for sure. However, no other mode gets me QSOs from far away places with my antenna setup than FT8/FT4. I did also try to figure out how to get fldigi to work so that I could play around with RTTY since the CQ WW RTTY WPX contest is taking place this weekend and RTTY is a mode I’ve never tried. While I can get fldigi to let me decode signals, I have yet to get it configured to allow me to transmit.
In other news, I attended a Basic Skywarn Spotters class at the local NWS office. Severe weather has always been a bit of an interest and the Skywarn program has been something I’ve known about since my early ham days but not something I’ve actively pursued becoming active with until now. With so much severe weather happening these days, participating in Skywarn nets and just helping the NWS with on-the-ground spotting assistance sounds like fun. If nothing else, participating might give me a reason to use my VHF/UHF gear that just sits around collecting dust.
I hope you all have been doing great. I’ll talk to you again soon. 73.
Matthew, K2MAS
K2MAS.net 