Since the FCC stopped issuing Advanced Class licenses, I’ve been telling everyone that the reason I haven’t upgraded to Extra is that I want to be the last living Advanced Class licensee in the U.S. My resolve is weakening, though, for several reasons:

A friend of mine recently sent me a press release touting free software that would turn your PC’s sound card into a function generator. As it turns out, the press release was somewhat misleading–as they often are. The software is really only free to use for 30 days, and then you have to pay $25 to obtain a registration key. That got me thinking that there must be some software out there that’s really free, so I did a Google search for “pc sound card function generator.”

Since I have had the use of an IC-746PRO recently, it’s been easier for me to work SSB. The reason for this is the internal automatic antenna tuner. Even though my dipole’s cut for the CW portion of the band, the antenna tuner provides a near perfect match in the phone band, without my having to twiddle any knobs.

I’ve made a few contacts on 40m SSB, but operation there is much different than on 40m CW.

I spent a lot of time on the air this weekend.

Here’s the first installment of Michigan Section club news. This should also appear on the ARRL Michigan Section web page.

I don’t know about you, but I think the term we used to describe our hobby is wrong. The term “Amateur Radio” does not describe all that we do, and it creates the wrong impression about what we’re about. It’s an antiquated term that we should jettison.

Today, we operated a special events station from the Monaghan Antique Engine Show here in Ann Arbor. The organizer of the event is an ARROW member, and he has a van outfitted for communications that he drives out to the site. He has a push up mast on which he mounts a G5RV antenna that he operates in an inverted V fashion. He has an antenna tuner, which he uses to get on 75m, mostly.

Since we were going to begin operation around noon, I figured that we probably should get on 40m instead of 75m. We pulled out the antenna tuner, but I couldn’t seem to get the antenna to tune properly on 40m. The best SWR I could achieve was 3:1. This was odd, I thought, as I was able to achieve very low SWR readings on both 75m and 20m.

I’m getting more comfortable at 24 wpm. My last three QSOs have been at 24 wpm. I really wish more people would find CW as much fun as I do. Here are a couple of links that might help.