Hi guys and gals!
Recently, I put AHRL on my grandpa's old laptop. This may replace the Dell Inspiron - I updated it with a new SSD, and it runs much faster! It is less than 10 years old, too. I have also come up with some modifications, tips, and tricks to the pre-existing system to best meet your needs.
Over this past weekend, I headed east to help clean out my grandpa's childhood home. It will be demolished in the next few weeks but it still had some things in it. One of those things was a Zenith AM radio - cool! I'm a huge stickler for AM radios. I love listening to stations over 200 miles away at night and I love the warm tone of AM. This is fueled even more by my amateur radio passion.
Hello everyone! I'm back with some more progress from the shack.
First, I'd like to start off with my FT-891. I love this radio and it has given me the best bang for my buck so far. This week, I thought I'd try some FT8, but what do I do about a sound interface?
Hi everyone, long time no see as usual.
Well, the semester is winding down finally, I've got about 2 or 3 weeks of school left. And boy, do you know what I'm doing once I get out of here... at least for the summer.
Over the Easter weekend, I thought I'd take my FT-891 and Chameleon TD LTE antenna out for some activation. We had Easter at my dad's family's in Bethany, Missouri (if you don't know where that's at, it's east of my QTH off of I-35). My young and curious cousin, Alex, also tagged along. He is into CB radios right now so I figured I'd expose him to ham radio while I was over there.
Alex seemed pretty interested while setting up my antenna and putting together my radio. While setting up, he asked how big the antenna was, and I told him 120 feet. Surprise was an understatement - he couldn't believe that there was an antenna that long! My grandparents had an old windmill about 10 feet high, so I mounted the center near the top using some paracord. It seemed to work fine and I might use it again if needed.
A few days ago I was introduced to the magical world of Winlink. Winlink works no different than APRS, other than the fact that it forwards your messages, either through the internet or via radio relay. It's good to have in case you lose internet and/or cell phone service, and messages pass along relatively fast.
The best thing about Winlink is that you can send it to an outside domain, it doesn't have to be a winlink.org domain. I can send emails perfectly (via telnet and HF) to my personal account. Unfortunately, because Winlink has to follow FCC laws, emails sent from Winlink are NOT encrypted, so don't send passwords, social security numbers, or medical stuff... you get the point.