Here’s the text of an article I recent sent in to the ARRL for publication in QST’s Op-Ed section…

No Ham Left Behind

Dan Romanchik, KB6NU
Michigan Section Affiliated Club Coordinator

A recent item on QRZ.Com reported that the number of licensed radio amateurs on April 3, 2005 was 667,318, a net loss of 20,542 from the peak in April 2003. There are 28,869 Novices; 318,221 Technicians; 137, 093 Generals; 76,706 Advanceds; and 106,238 Amateur Extras.

Some of those that replied to this post used the decline in the number of licensees to predict the imminent death of amateur radio. While I’m not quite so alarmist as these guys, I do think the numbers point to a problem. The problem is not, however, the number of amateur radio licensees, but the number of active amateur radio operators.

Samuel F.B. Morse, for whom the Morse Code is named was born 214 years ago today. But we should perhaps be calling it the Vail Code instead, as Craig W3CRR recently pointed out on the ARRL’s PR Mailing List:

Recently, Ray Goff G4FON added MP3 generation to his brilliant Koch CW Trainer program. Now, Nigel Gunn G8IFF/KC8NHF is using that feature to make available the newsletter of the Flying Pigs QRP Club International–Bacon Bits Quarterly (BBQ)–in CW format. The files are a bit on the large side–part 1 of the April editorial was a bit over 20 Mbytes, but the code is beautiful. I’ve suggested to Nigel that he may want to zip the files as that makes them quite a bit smaller.

A couple of months ago, a group of us were talking on the repeater, and the talk got around to building stuff. One of the guys said, “You can’t really build anything anymore.” I almost fell out of my chair. There are all kinds of kits out there that hams can build.

So, yesterday, I gave a presentation to our club on kits and kit building. After the short presentation–whichi I’ve included below–we had a show-and-tell of kits that were brought in by the members and were in various stages of completion. (Pictures coming soon!)

So, what are you going to build next?

For the past several months I’ve been using an Icom IC-746PRO that was donated to ARROW. I’ve been feeling a little guilty about using it for so long, so when someone offered to sell me a unit he bought in February, I jumped at the chance. He sold it to me for $1250, about $300 less than what they’re going for these days.

I really like the rig, although to be honest, I don’t have much to compare it with. The last rig I used regularly was an old IC-735, which I also like a lot, but it doesn’t have the bells and whistles that the 746 has.

Here’s another thread from the wonderful Elecraft mailling list:

Vic, K2VCO writes:

I made a simple 1:1 receive-only balun for 160 meters by winding 9 bifilar turns of no. 24 enameled wire on an FT37-77 toroid. I connected a 50-ohm resistor to the output and my MFJ antenna analyzer to the input. On 1.8 MHz it shows a resistance of 50 ohms, an inductive reactance of 1 ohm, and an SWR of 1.0:1.

My question is, did I make a ‘good’ balun? Are there other tests I should do?

Try these to get a feel for how rhytmic CW can be:

• BENS BEST BENT WIRE
• BEST BEEF ESSENCE
• BEST BENT WIRE /5

I got all of these from the wonderful Elecraft mailing list. Just click on the list items to download a zipped mp3 file. I’m sorry about the zip, but it was the only way to make the file small enough to be easily downloadable. Zipped, these files are about 60 kbytes; unzipped, they’re over 2.5 Mbytes.