Out of all the years I’ve been involved in amateur radio, and all of the years I was interested but not licensed, I’d always heard about Field Day, but until this year had never actually attended. Most years I had weddings I was photographing, or other schedule conflicts that prevented me from joining in, but [...]
This morning in Santa Cruz, there is a county wide hospital evacuation drill taking place. To monitor the drill, listen in on the K6BJ repeater at 146.790- PL 94.8 from 8:30 am – 11:30 am. Reprint from the Santa Cruz Sentinel: SANTA CRUZ: Hospitals to stage evacuation drill The Santa Cruz County Public Health Department [...]
Here is a ten minute film from 1939 showing some of what amateur radio is all about. It’s amazing, some things have changed a lot, some things seem exactly the same. It was some of these things that got me interested in amateur radio in the first place!
Pardon my complaining attitude in this post, but maybe there are good reasons. So the basic story is some of us use APRS transmitters to track our location as we move around (be it hiking, biking, sailing, in the car or in a plane). For some of us, our goal is to be picked up [...]
For those interested in hearing about the Santa Cruz ARES Ham Radio response to this week’s communications outage in Santa Cruz, San Benito and Santa Cruz Counties. The cause of the outage were multiple cuts in the Fiber Optic cables which ended up shutting down almost all land line telephone, cellular and internet connections in [...]
I had been playing with my Yaesu FT-817ND for a while, but not really using it very much on VHF/UHF, primarily because I hadn’t programmed very many of the local repeaters in to it. As with any radio, I really dislike programming a lot of memories in to them via their on device programming methods [...]
It probably started when I was around 7-10 years old… I had a neighbor who lived down the street and our cheap walkie-talkies just couldn’t reach but we devised the plan that if we could just learn morse code we could use our flashlights to communicate. The only problem was… learning morse code! My desire [...]
Where to start… so back in High School I had an electronics teacher at Harbor High School named Dan White. He was a ham and talked about radio in class and gave us demonstrations of how he used radio. Even before that I used walkie talkies, and later CB Radio. Around that time I received [...]
I had received my Rtrack APRS tracker a few months ago, and it seemed to operate properly but was rarely picked up by local digis or igates. After finally getting some more time to work with it, I played with the configuration a bit, adjusted antennas and such, but now it absolutely refuses to get [...]
On Saturday morning I headed over to the monthly Electronics Flea Market over at the De Anza College parking lot. My main reason for going was to pick up a few more of the $1 LED Keychain flashlights I got there a few months back, mine broke and Ellen wanted one. Of course I wanted [...]