On the HamRadioHelpGroup mailing list, a ham asked:
Will a CB SWR meter work on a 2 meter ham radio??
Mark, K5LXP, replied:
Yes and no.
I use a CB SWR meter to check 2M antennas all the time. There is a trick to it however.
If all you want to to is check SWR on your 2M antenna, [...]

My ham radio weekend started early. Even though we were scheduled to start operating at the museum at 10 am, I thought I’d turn on the rig and see what condition 40m was in. One reason for doing this is that we intended to operate the Jamboree on the Air. I found that the band [...]

Barry, K2JV, wrote this for the ARRL’s Contact, an e-mail newsletter for PIOs:
The New Providence Amateur Radio Club of New Jersey has been actively introducing kids to Amateur Radio for about 5 years. The activities and events which we have mentored have been a source of considerable pleasure for the senior club members involved, but [...]

Want to be the coolest ham in your club? Then, you need the new Agilent N9912A FieldFox RF Analyzer. This baby does it all:

Cable and Antenna Analyzer

Frequency range: 2 MHz to 4 GHz and optional 6 GHz
Directivity: > 42 dB
Measurement speed: 1.5 ms / per point

Network Analyzer

2 MHz to 4 GHz and optional 6 GHz
S11 [...]

Threads on attaching PL-259s to coax are a mainstay of most amateur radio mailing lists. If you subscribe to as many as I do, you see at least five or six every year. This last week, yet another one popped up on the HamRadioHelpGroup. Below, is, imho, the most useful reply:
A good tool for this [...]

Nick, KD8IPE, one of the guys in my latest Tech class got interested in working 6m and asked me about 6m antenna. Well, having never worked 6m, I didn’t have a very good answer for him. Then, I thought about the J-pole antenna. I have built many 2m J-poles. They’re simple to build, and [...]

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 [...]

I’ve always said that I’m no antenna genius. And I readily admit as much when I teach the General Class license course. The main problem, of course, is that you can’t really see how an antenna works in the same way that you can see how a circuit works. It’s awfully hard to measure [...]

Julius, N2WN, posted a link to this video of F8BBL working CW without a key on the Elecraft mailling list. He has pretty good technique, I think. Maybe in the next video, he’ll use three fingers in iambic mode. :)
Put on a PL-259 in Six Minutes!
While I was on YouTube, I also found a couple [...]

Here are a bunch of quick links to interesting stuff that I’ve learned about, either from the ham radio lists I’m subscribed to or from friends who’ve sent me links to thing they think would interest me. I try to save these and do a more complete entry on them, but when they start piling [...]