My blog entry from a couple of days ago laid out the description of a Palm computer program I proposed to write. Well, I now have the very first version ready. Download it here. After you unzip, install both the NSBasic Runtime (NSBRuntime.prc) and the HamHandy program (HamHandy.prc). I know that’s a little kludgey, but in future versions, I’ll combine it all into one file.

Any and all feedback would be appreciated.

Yesterday, my brother-in-law and his family came over for a visit. They don’t visit that often as they have lived in Tokyo for the last three years, so they’ve never seen my ham equipment before. When they arrived, I happened to be in the shack, so before we all went upstairs, they got a quickie demo of ham radio.

The demo must have struck a chord because after dinner, my ten-year-old nephew Nicholas asked if he could go downstairs and look at the radios.

There are already many good ham radio applications for the Palm. Probably the most comprehensive list is the VA3PKH Palm Ham Page. It looks like there are quite a few good logging programs, and even several good Morse code training programs. There’s certainly no need to reinvent those wheels.

Even so, I wanted to develop some kind of ham radio application for my Palm

I got an Elecraft K1 for Christmas! I’m getting the four-band version. This looks like a seriously fun kit to build.

What did you get?

OK, I can see all of you out there saying, what the heck does giving presentations have to do with amateur radio? Well, I happen to be of the opinion that giving a good presentation is one of those basic skills that apply to every aspect of one’s life. In this case, I’m writing about it here because I am in the process of trying to plan out this year’s list of presentations at our monthly meetings..

Generating a list of topics is the easy part. In fact, here’s my list:

My colleague, Martin Rowe, forwarded a link to this National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) news item about printable transistors. As he says in his e-mail, “This is just plain cool.”

For many years–17 to be exact–I’ve owned an MFJ 941D VersaTuner II antenna tuner. I never really had any success using it, though, and for most of those years it’s simply sat on a shelf. Not being an antenna genius, I could never figure out whether my lack of success was due to my poor antenna skills or the less-than-rugged construction of the device.

Sidney Harris was a newspaper columnist columnist and cartoonist whose work appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. If you were reading at all during those years, I’m sure you’ve seen his work. He was a keen observer and a wry wit.

Every now and then, he’d write a column entitled “Things I Learned While Looking Up Something Else.” If I recall correctly, there were seven or eight little tidbits in each column. If he were still writing today, I’m sure he’d write columns with the title, “Websites I Found While Searching for Something Else.” So, with apologies to Mr. Harris, here’s my first installment…

At the Findlay, OH hamfest, back in September, I bought a used Gap Titan antenna. At the time, it looked like I got a pretty good deal on the thing. I payed only $100 for an antenna that cost about $340 new. Even so, I put off building it and setting it up as everything I read about it said that the instructions were difficult to follow, and since mine was half-built, I figured it would be even harder to build.

As I’ve mentioned before, I own and operate Quality Technical Books. While I started out carrying quality engineering and electrical engineering books, my big sellers these days are amateur radio books. Yesterday, I received a new shipment from the ARRL with some books that I hadn’t carried before. Here’s a short review of three of them: