Morse code is a joy, and with the right “paddles” it is pure bliss. Here’s an essay on the pursuit of ham radio happiness.
If you’re new to radio teletype (RTTY) contesting, you’re about to fall in love with it. Here are some quick tips to help you get started.
Welcome to the new VA7ST.ca website. Be sure to update your bookmarks to this new location (the old location at www3.telus.net/va7st will disappear soon).
Want to see how VA7ST has done in contests since 2002? It’s all online in a sortable database — check out my contest scores, and read my 3830 stories about each contest.
Depending on your location, changing your rotator control meter’s scale to a north-centered scale could greatly reduce the turning required to work the most popular areas. Here’s a step-by-step guide to making the change on a CDE rotator control — including a printable high-resolution image of the North-centered meter scale.
It was a high honor to be chosen for a contester profile feature in the Nov.-Dec. 2010 edition of the National Contest Journal.
The new Orca DX and Contest Club serves BC and the northern part of Washington State. I’m the webmaster, so my part has been developing the web site.
Here’s a great 80M antenna: a pair of raised 1/4-wave (68′) verticals in the pine woods, using Christman phasing, and capable of firing in either of two directions. Mine aim east and west.
This may be the cheapest, lowest, no-radials-required, no fancy networks, way to get great gain on 40M. If you have some rope, trees, junkbox wire, a couple of DPDT relays, and some coax laying around, you have all it takes to build this antenna.
Sometimes when my antenna is at 25′, I do quite well into Canada and the U.S — perhaps even better than with the antenna at 45′. Terrain analysis helped end the mystery of height vs. performance at this ridge-top QTH.
On Christmas Day 2009, Knut Haugland, the last surviving crew member of the Kon-Tiki voyage, passed away at the age of 92.
Here’s an easy way to permanently remove the vGrabber Community Toolbar from Google Chrome, using the Microsoft Registry Editor to delete Chrome’s extensions.
Morse code is a joy, and with the right “paddles” it is pure bliss. Here’s an essay on the pursuit of ham radio happiness.
If you’re new to radio teletype (RTTY) contesting, you’re about to fall in love with it. Here are some quick tips to help you get started.
Welcome to the new VA7ST.ca website. Be sure to update your bookmarks to this new location (the old location at www3.telus.net/va7st will disappear soon).
Want to see how VA7ST has done in contests since 2002? It’s all online in a sortable database — check out my contest scores, and read my 3830 stories about each contest.
The cost and environmental impact of paper QSL cards makes this aspect of ham radio part of our history, not our future.
Depending on your location, changing your rotator control meter’s scale to a north-centered scale could greatly reduce the turning required to work the most popular areas. Here’s a step-by-step guide to making the change on a CDE rotator control — including a printable high-resolution image of the North-centered meter scale.
It was a high honor to be chosen for a contester profile feature in the Nov.-Dec. 2010 edition of the National Contest Journal.
The new Orca DX and Contest Club serves BC and the northern part of Washington State. I’m the webmaster, so my part has been developing the web site.
Here’s a great 80M antenna: a pair of raised 1/4-wave (68′) verticals in the pine woods, using Christman phasing, and capable of firing in either of two directions. Mine aim east and west.
This may be the cheapest, lowest, no-radials-required, no fancy networks, way to get great gain on 40M. If you have some rope, trees, junkbox wire, a couple of DPDT relays, and some coax laying around, you have all it takes to build this antenna.
Here’s a two-element array of wire verticals for 40M — read about using passive phasing, then Christman phasing. Includes a handy online calculator for phasing line lengths, and audio clips of the array in action.
