A ham radio license is more than a ticket to operate on the amateur radio bands. A couple of years ago, I was at a local chamber of commerce meeting and struck up a conversation with a guy who was in charge of engineering for a local high tech startup company. When he heard I [...]

When teaching my General Class license class, I find that one of the concepts that students have the hardest time understanding is the frequency domain. Even so, as we move to software-defined radios, it’s an important concept for radio amateurs to understand. Now, DSPDesignLine, a website for electronics engineers working with digital signal processing, is [...]

The Hustler 4BTV, 5BTV, and 6BTV trap vertical antennas have been sold for as long as I’ve  been a ham (37 years now!). I’m sure they’ve sold thousands of them.  They are inexpensive, rugged, and when used with a good number of radials, great antennas.
The one problem is that they were designed before we got [...]

An article published on eSchool News, “Summit: Save STEM or watch America fail” reports that the United States is falling behind in math and science education, and that this is endangering America’s competitiveness in the global economy. Recently, education leaders, lawmakers, and cabinet members met for a national summit in Washington, D.C., to discuss what [...]

If not, this video should get you pumped up:

For a list of Field Day locations near you, go to the ARRL FD Locator.
Thanks to W1AGP, the ARRL’s PR Guy for the link, and to stormspotterkwp—whoever you are—for producing the video.

One of the fun things about operating at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum is enjoying the company of other hams and sharing ideas. Two weeks ago, a bunch of us were joking about how to make CW more fun and get more kids into it. Well, someone noted that since CW is a rhythm kind [...]

Mike, K8XF, is an on-the-air friend of mine and one heck of an operator. Here’s something that was recently published in Issue #3 of the Fists CW Club newsletter:
Calling CQ
Mike Zbrozek, K8XF
Fists #6773, Radio Electronics Officer 1980-1996
I have noticed in the past two years the art of calling CQ has changed. Too many ops seem [...]

I spent most of the last week at the Rotary International (RI) 2008 convention. Rotary International is a service organization with over 1.2 million members who belong to more than 33,000 clubs in more than 200 countries around the world. I am very proud of of being a part of this group.
The parallels between Rotary [...]

From the 6/10/08 issue of NIST Tech Beat, the e-newlsetter of the National Institute of Standards and Technology:
Relax, even scientists can sometimes use help when making conversions and measurements with the modern metric system, the International System of Units (known as SI from the French “Le Systeme International d’Unites”.) The good news is that the [...]