My mobile rig is an Icom IC-706mkII HF/2m unit that’s been doing me well for months, semi-permanently installed in the car. Lately I’ve been noticing signs of its deterioration, getting signal reports that I’m either cutting out or the audio has a sporadic “electric shock” sound. I’ve been trying like hell to track it down, …
Category Archives: Amateur Radio
Pinch To Talk
Behold my score from Austin Summerfest: I’ve had an iambic paddle on my ham radio grocery list for a while, and now I have one. I guess this means I have to get better at Morse Code to be able to use it frequently. Right? Picked it up second-hand for about forty bucks. To make …
Fat, Thick, and Dirty
I finally did it. I soldered a pair of PL-259 connectors (screw-on type) onto a 28′ (8m) length of scavenged RG-8 cable. And it works. It really, really works. Of course, they’re really, really dirty. And it took me 2 hours to f’n do it. But it works.
Tiny, Cheap, Expensive
Picked up an RTL-SDR software-defined radio dongle. Because reasons. After an evening of driver hell, I decided today that maybe I should read the quick-start instructions. Gosh, they’re more helpful than I imagined. Finally got the SDRSharp software to recognize the dongle and start tuning and decoding radio. Unfortunately, my poor old laptop is just …
Vee
Experiments with operating the radio at home continue. Had a wacky idea to use the anchor in the tree over my balcony as the support for a 20m inverted-V dipole, fed with 300ohm twinlead for multi-band matching. Brainstormed a plan to use a pair of bamboo fishing poles, anchored by pole brackets on the balcony …