About a month ago, a friend of mine took over as newsletter editor for the Livingston (County) Amateur Radio Klub (LARK) and asked if I would be interested in submitting a regular column to their newsletter. Well, that sounded like work, so my first thought was to pass on that offer, but I [...]

The 12/26/07 of the ARRL Contest Rate Sheet had the following item:
Next time you open up your radio, consider that 55 years ago George Rose K2AH, made the first solid-state amateur transmission with a single-transistor homebrew rig. It used an RCA point-contact germanium transistor. Rose measured an input power of 24 mW and estimated [...]

In the last couple of days, there has arisen quite a furor over a petition to change the rules regarding the use of digital modes. The petition number is RM-11392. You can find it on the FCC website by going to http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/comsrch_v2.cgi and entering the petition number in the “Proceeding” text box. The petition will [...]

Radio quiet zone, that is. The Quiet Zone is a 13,000 square mile area in the mountains straddling the states of VA and WV. The reason it was declared a quiet zone is to allow radio astronomers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to do their research and an NSA group to perform surveillance.
The [...]

This item is from the November 2007 edition of the ARRL’s Education Services News for Instructors and Teachers….Dan
Teachers and Scout leaders and others who are working with kids and amateur radio have been telling us that it can be difficult to find another school or group of kids to talk to. Scheduled nets are pretty [...]

This item is more of a reminder for me, but other folks might find this useful as well. James, AD1L, recently posted links to the service manual and schematics on the icom746pro mailing list:

Service Manual
Schematics

The schematics are in a zip file, but the manual is a djvu file. I’d never heard of this file format [...]

I’ve just started reading the book, Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath. The premise of this book is that if you have something to say, there are good ways and bad ways to formulate and present your ideas, and that if you do it the good way and not the bad way, your [...]

RF DesignLine is running a series of articles on RF propagation:

Part 1 covers propagation basics
Part 2 covers multipath phenomena
Part 3 will cover diversity techniques

This article is directed at engineers, so the mathematics is a bit advanced, but if you can crack that, these articles should give you a better understanding of RF propagation phenomena.

Solar physicists have detected, “a modest knot of magnetism that popped over the sun’s eastern limb on Dec. 11th, pictured in a pair of images from the orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).” So says the article “Is a New Solar Cycle Beginning?” on the NASA website.
The article goes on to say, “It may not [...]

If you homebrew at all, chances are you’ve used the 555 timer. EETimes.Com has recently run the article, “The 555: Best IC Ever Or Obsolete Anachronism?” that attempts to divine why it’s so popular and to suggest some alternatives to this part, which was designed in 1971.
As to the popularity of the IC, the [...]