Category: Radio

Going to the Bismarck Hamfest

I’m planning on going to the CDARC 2017 Hamfest in Bismarck that will be held on February 25, 2017. As of right now, my youngest son and I will be heading over there on Feb. 24th (leaving in the afternoon) and staying in a hotel, so we can get up bright and early on Saturday. Things open up at 7:00am on Saturday.

Here’s a link to the PDF that’s on their site.

If anybody in the area would also like to go, and needs a ride, get in touch with me. I have a comfortable, full sized van and a lot of room for more people. I’m also a very careful driver. I would not expect any money for gas (since I’ll be using the gas whether you go, or not). You’d have to get your own hotel room (and food), though. If you get in touch, I’ll let you know where we’ll be staying on Friday night. There’s also a few other hotels in the same general area, so you could shop around, a bit, if you wanted, and I would (of course) do the drop off and pick up.

My main reason for going is to take a stab at the General test. My son will be trying for his Tech ticket, also. I’m not sure if either of us will be “ready” by then, but we’ll give it a shot, anyway. The secondary reason is just for the experience. This will actually be the first hamfest that I’ll be attending.

Eyeball QSO

While I was at work, tonight, made a completely random “eyeball QSO” with an amateur radio operator that I had never met, before. I work in a hotel, which gives me the opportunity to meet a “lot” of new people on a daily basis. I happened to be helping out at the front desk, tonight, when I saw a truck pull up under the front canopy. On the other side of the truck, I noticed what looked to me like a screwdriver antenna (when you’re a ham, antennas catch your eye). The base of the antenna was obscured by the bed of the truck, so I couldn’t see the whole thing.

As the man walked in the front doors, I asked him if that was a screwdriver antenna on the back of his truck, before I even looked at him. As I was finishing the question, I turned my eyes to him, and realized that he was wearing an ARRL shirt. Of course, we shook hands, and exchanged call signs, and he told me that it was actually a hamstick. He also told me that his wife was a ham, and told me her call sign (though I didn’t get to meet her).

I had my HT in the back room, and threw out my call on 146.52 and the local repeater a couple times, after that, but never heard from him on the radio. I’m sure he was in town for the rodeo finals, and I just assume that he wasn’t actually monitoring the radio because of that.

It was still pretty cool how virtually perfect strangers are able to connect because of a common interest. Even though I never actually talked to him on the radio, should I put it in the log book?

New Ideas

Sometimes I feel like I might be stretching myself a little thin. Between my personal life, work, and hobbies, there doesn’t seem to be enough time for all of it. One must always focus on the important things, and the other stuff will just happen when it happens. For now, I can still have the ideas in my head and on paper. I’ll just have to wait until the right time comes along to justify throwing money at the “less important” things.

Tonight, I realized (I’ve never actually looked, before) that a person can actually build a single band repeater (not a simplex repeater) without using any kind of duplexers or actual “repeater” hardware. The cost of doing this is relatively low, compared to what a person could spend on building a repeater. I still don’t exactly know the guidelines surrounding around setting this up, but I plan on looking into it over the next few weeks. I always want to stay on the legal side of things, so I need to make sure that setting up a “permanent” repeater is something I can do. Need to make sure I’m not bending any rules, at all.

I have the perfect place already picked out in my mind. The total overall cost would be about $800 to $1000. Justifying spending that much money for something that might not get used much, at all, though, is another story. I would be putting up a repeater in the 2 meter band in an area that already has a really wide coverage repeater which hardly gets used at all. There’s also a 70cm repeater in the same town that gets used even less. Because I live in a town that is in the middle of a huge rural area (35 miles from a smaller town and 100 miles from the nearest larger town), I’m not sure that another repeater would be a good idea.

Maybe the idea that I have is more of an interest in being able to actually “do it”, than that of necessity. In that case, I keep going back to the thought that I should just save the money and put it in more useful areas… like a new radio?

Already Wanting To Upgrade

I guess it’s already time for me to start studying, again. I knew that I wanted to upgrade my ticket, but I’ve recently got into something that’s making me want it, even more.

SDR (Software Defined Radio) is really an amazing thing that I have recently discovered. In the past, when I was really into the radio hobby, I had often wished for something that would allow me to receive a large section (and even multiple sections) of radio spectrum simultaneously. I might have even heard about something that did this, in the past, but it wasn’t very popular, then. Lately, there are more and more affordable ways for radio hobbyists to be able to listen to more than they were ever able to, in the past.

SDR is a receive-only platform that is used in conjunction with a computer. Through a matter of connecting various hardware and converters to a computer, then connecting antennas, you can listen to a very wide range of frequencies. Software that is used with SDRs also allows you to visualize the complete radio spectrum, so you can “see” what you want to listen to.

While I was looking at buying a new shortwave radio, I thought that I would just buy the things that I need for an SDR. Then, I discovered that I really didn’t need to invest all that money in the hardware and antennas, right now. “Jackpot” is what I thought!

Now, go check it out, yourself!