Amateur Radio

This will just be a quick post to share the cable I built for interfacing PC audio with my Xiegu G90 for digital radio modes.

The homepage for the EveryHam Amateur Radio Contest is now live at EveryHam.org!

A trial contest was run on 18 April, thanks to the help of KD3BTG, M0CUV, N3VEM, N3CAN, and K3QB. I would consider the trial contest to be a success; it helped expose some bugs my ADIF parsing script and taught me some important lessons.

I love the concept of radio communication; from playing with 27mhz “walkie talkies” as to kid, to CB and LMR as a teen, and then finally licensed amateur radio as an adult.

I’m just a nerd; learning about and experimenting with radio frequencies is just plain fun.

Scheduling Linux tasks isn't a new idea, but as I was creating a quick cron entry on my hotspot, it occurred to me that there may be some hams out there who aren't familiar with the process.

My objective was to have my hotspot connect to the "East Coast Reflector's (ECR)" YSF room each morning at 7am (eastern) for "The Morning Brew" radio net. My hotspot is running WPSD, which is a fork of the typical PiStar OS. This same concept should work on a PiStar hotspot, however, using the pi-star equivalent commands.

I posted a while back about online amateur radio logging (here) and wanted to do a follow up on some of the client software I’ve been using to log contacts and sync to both LOTW and QRZ.

I used to use CQRLOG, which is still a great logger, but it is primarily intended to be installed directly on the PC you’re logging from. If you want to view QSOs or add a new entry, you need to have access to that PC.
For greater flexibility, there are now self-hosted server-based logging platforms which allow access from any device with a web browser and internet access, such as Wavelog and Cloudlog. I’m going to refer to Wavelog throughout this post, but the features are similar between them both Wavelog and Cloudlog (the former being a fork of the latter).

Logging amateur radio activity has been around about as long as amateur radio itself. At one time, it was required that all amateur stations kept a log of their activity. Now, it's no longer required, but it is still a very common practice.
Many people enjoy trying to contact a variety of different geographical areas, such as each of the United States, various different countries, or specific zones or grids. The easiest way to keep track of this is with a station log, particularly a modern online logbook.
There are a number of different online log books, but they generally have the same core features. They record your contacts, confirm your contacts, and track awards.

On the first morning of ARRL Field Day, I got a quick and very blurry photo from a relative of what appeared to be an older oscilloscope or other test equipment. She had found it at a local yard sale and thought it might be something I was interested in.
She was right.

After quickly getting dressed, I headed out to see this item for myself. It turns out that it was, in fact, a 1970s radio communications receiver. This receiver was sold under the Sears brand, but was actually a Yaesu FRG-7. This receiver can receive AM, CW and SSB from 500kHz to 30MHz. Unlike modern ham or SWL receivers, there's no digital display. Tuning in to a signal actually takes a combination of 4 different dials.  Regardless, it cost me $3, it  works, and it has a certain charm to it.