This isn’t really ham radio related, but it’s amusing. Can anyone out there think of a way to hack a Billy Big Mouth Bass so that it can be used in ham radio? One thought I had was to perhaps use it as a kind of “on the air” sign. Another idea might be to [...]

We may be at the nadir of the sunspot cycle, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of interest out there in solar data. If you’re hot for this kind of thing, I suggest you get the FREE Solar Data Plotting Utility.
As the website notes:
This application was written mainly for Amateur Radio Operators who [...]

I’ve written before about how it would be nice if QRP ops had a little more ooomph from time to time. I was thinking that 20 or 30 W would be a good figure to shoot for. That’s a little over 6 dB for a 5 W transmitter.
For even lower-power rigs, such as the [...]

For the last several months, I’ve been working with some kids at Scarlett Middle School here in Ann Arbor, teaching them about electronics and amateur radio. For a number of reasons—that I won’t go into just yet—I haven’t been as successful as I was hoping to be.
Dismayed by my lack of success, I went to [...]

This is from the March 18, 2008 issue of NIST Tech Beat. It seems to me this technology could also be used at UHF, VHF, and perhaps even HF frequencies……Dan
Recent research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has demonstrated that thin films made of “metamaterials”—manmade composites engineered to offer strange combinations of [...]

Well, here’s my first attempt at video. These are clips from our operations today at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum.
Just to warn you, this is not the best video. Being my first, the clips jump kind of abruptly from one to another. The video quality isn’t very good, either. I produced this with iMovie on [...]

Sometimes, ham radio can be very frustrating. There are times when it seems no one can hear me, and I swear that my antenna’s come down. Usually, I just write off this experience as it being “one of those nights.”
Fortunately, tonight wasn’t one of those nights. In fact, it was quite the opposite.
As I’ve said [...]

…the more they stay the same. Read this article, “Friends in Radioland,” from a 1961 issue of Time magazine. Here’s an excerpt:
Amateur radio operators are called hams, and it is easy to see why: talk, talk, talk—that’s all they seem to do. There are 250,000 of them in the U.S., and another estimated 100,000 elsewhere [...]

N1JOY is putting together a really neat communications trailer lovingly called HamCOW, short for Ham Communications on Wheels. Features include:

Spacious - 28 feet long x 8 feet wide x 7 feet high inside.
5 comfortable operating positions, each one has 2 wired Ethernet connections, 4 antenna ports wired
to a coax patch panel, dedicated Astron 50 [...]

My good friend and colleague, Jack Vaughan, is always keeping an eye out for the slightly off-beat. When he finds something technical in nature, he forwards me the link.
A couple of days ago, he forwarded a link to a paper that described how to hack wireless pacemakers. The paper, titled “Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators: [...]