HamRadioNow

Two of them, in fact. A Partial this year, and a Total in 2024.

A good eclipse can draw a huge mass of people into a fairly small band of territory, with the potential for overloaded roads and communications facilities. That’s an opportunity for hams to help out… if we’re prepared. Some areas were prepared in 2017, the last total eclipse that went coast-to-coast. We’ll learn about that, and plans for this and next year on our Sunday live show. Tune in!

Our sarcastic take on the Ask Me Anything shows when there’s nothing to talk about. Gary K4AAQ leads off this Sunday morning show after combing Reddit and finding yet another ham asking about calling CQ on… well, in this case, it’s simplex on FM on 2 meters and 70 cm. Seems somebody got on his case about it. Ring any bells? HamRadioNow 315 comes to mind (Do NOT Call CQ on Repeaters). So, yeah, repeaters, but the points are valid for simplex FM, too.

About this point, David W0DHG logged in and we review the responses. Gary was hoping somebody would have linked to his iconic show. Nobody had, until a chat-room viewer took care of it (thanks, chat-room!).

Then Jim NO1PC joined the Zoom, and discovered a broken connection in his audio system (remember the ‘mungy’ audio Gary complained about in the last show?). He fixed it on the fly.

Then David had to get ready for his WaveTalkers show, and we wrapped up.

Gary, Jim and David discuss repairs to to the Q-Mobile and Ham Radio News of the week….

Gary went skiing and brought along 8 handhelds…. David went to Death Valley and brought 8 radios too! Along with Jim we discuss travel, packing and interoperatility…

M17 is the new kid on the VHF/UHF Digital Voice block. You’re not going to be picking up a new M17 radio at HRO anytime soon – it’s decidedly experimental at this point. But it’s not vaporware, either. In this episode, HRN host Gary K4AAQ talks… at length… with Ed Wilson N2XDD and Steve Miller KC1AWV about what M17 is, how you can get into it, and what the future might be.

At length? Well, that was a challenge. Ed mentioned that the longest show they did – and they’ve done almost all the other shows – was three hours (turns out the YouTube length for that show was only 2:46). So we had to beat it, and we did.

This was an off-schedule Friday night show for us. David W0DHG was on his way to his stage in the Baker to Vegas run, and Jim NO1PC had family-time. We will be back together soon (but not too soon - Gary has a ski trip next week).

Down below you’ll see links to Michelle Thompson’s Blog about M17 and ARDC. Toward the end of the show (which turns out to be long before the end of the show), Gary brings up a controversy that Michelle told him about, concerning funding for M17, her Open Research Institute, and ARDC. Read the blog post, and watch the show at that point for the details. We’ll cover other points of view about that in future shows.

LINKS:

M17 Project web site

Michelle Thompson’s Blog about M17 funding and ARDC

Michelle at 2016 TAPR DCC

It was going to be The David and Gary Show because we didn’t have prep, so we didn’t have a topic or theme (not that all of the shows actually stick to a topic or theme). And just before showtime, somebody smacked into a power pole down the block from the West Coast Studio, and David was left in the dark. And that’s the last we’ve heard from him (at least as I’m typing this).

But the show must go on, so Gary (me) managed to vamp for about 45 minutes before wrapping things up and sending everyone to Ria’s Ham Shack to brush up on getting their General license.

Oh, and I figured out how to invite people to our Discord: https://discord.gg/wZNBfEmB (link expires on March 26, so hurry).

East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ presented a forum on Digital Voice for VHF/UHF 2023 at the Charlotte Hamfest in March. Gary ‘inherited’ the forum from Roland Kraatz W9HPX, who became a Silent Key the previous December. Gary put in too many hours making ‘too many PowerPoint slides’ to just do a one-hour forum, so he recorded this Special Edition for HamRadioNow.

This version clocks in at about 90 minutes. Gary had to cut a lot of the slides he worked so hard to create to bring his talk down to an hour, so he put some of them back in for this version. Then, just for those of you with limited time, he took a digital axe to the whole thing and chopped it down to 15 minutes. It isn’t pretty, but the essential elements are there. Maybe.

We’re also presenting Gary’s original 2008 documentary Digital Voice for Amateur Radio, which includes his investigation of D-STAR and P-25, and the original DV mode for HF. Somehow all that is squeezed into less time than his slide show.

Audio podcast listeners are being treated only to the 90 minute slide show. If you want to see the truncated version, or the documentary, here’s the link to the web site: https://www.hamradionow.tv/episodes/2023/3/15/hrn-special-digital-voice-2023-vhfuhf-edition

The FCC has been MIA for some time in ham radio. RMs (Requests for Rulemaking) and a couple of NPRMs (Notices of Proposed Rulemaking) have been dormant for up to 10 years! We look at some of the important ones, and some that are important only to the guy who proposed them.

If you want to make comments on any RM or NPRM, review any of the proceedings (read the comments), or file one yourself (please don’t), this is the place: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings

East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ is working on a slide deck for a hamfest talk next weekend (Charlotte Hamfest - see him live at 9 am Saturday, March 12). The topic is Digital Voice - VHF/UHF edition. Gary’s still working on the slides. He’s in the 70s. A good PowerPoint talk has maybe 30 slides, tops, say the experts. Do we have a problem? What do they know?

West Coast Host David W0DHG is the audience as Gary rehearses the talk. At the one hour point,
Gary was in the 60s. So close? We’ll watch the playback to see how it paces. David tried hard not to fall asleep.

A decibel is 1/10 of a Bel. By rights, this should be 1/10 of a show, but it’s at least 1/3. So bonus.

Well, at least we didn’t resort to an Ask Me Anything 🙄. Instead, Jim NO1PC and David W0DHG scraped Gary K4AAQ’s Facebook feed for Elmer questions that he answered in his usual “here’s how to build a clock” complexity. Or not! The dB answer was an attempt to simplify, to explain decibels without any math. Almost no math. Because Gary doesn’t know the math. He does it all by remembering 3 dB and 10 dB. Everything else slides between those two markers.

Then there’s a dual band antenna mystery to solve, some background on just how unique your call sign is, and a review of tone decode. All with a low grade fever.