HamRadioNow

It was time to do a promo for HRN 451, to be titled New Rig… Who Dis?. David W0DHG was driving home (LA) from San Francisco. Gary K4AAQ anchored from the Studio in the Bonus Room Above the Garage on the North Side of Fort Mill (SC), in the Shadow of Charlotte, at the Foot of Mt. Belzoni.

A little over three hours later, then were done… apparently only because David arrived home.

David was in SF to visit one of his daughters. While they were attending an event, David’s rental car (good gas mileage offset rental price) was broken into, and his backpack with a PC and his AnyTone HT (in the trunk, not on the seat, so the thief was onto that trick) were stolen. And a window was broken. So much for savings. Likely his 2007 Toyota FJ, bristling with antennae, would not have been so assaulted.

No, it doesn’t take three hours to tell that story, so clearly there’s more. Probably about 45 minutes of real entertainment, sadly embedded in 3+ hours of ‘show’.

Oh, and ‘PROMORE’? That may have been a typo in the chat, or it may have been deliberate. Anyway, it’s a new way to label our extended ‘promo’ videos.

WARNING!! A Zoom issue caused David’s end of the call to echo everything Gary said. Gary - hearing his own voice which he loves - was good with that. Gary’s wife Cyndi KD4ACW, said it was ‘very annoying’. This Website agrees with Cyndi. Listen at your own risk 👂🔈🔉🔊. It clears up toward the end, but only so you can hear what you should have been hearing all along, if only they had hung up on Zoom and reconnected.

25 Miles comes from a fairly frequent Facebook inquiry from non-hams (usually) wondering how they might be able to communicate over X distance with some kind of radio technology when ‘All Else Fails’ - no cell phones, no Internet, no nothing (maybe sat phones… we didn’t think of that). The answer changes as you fill in the X with different distances, and 25 miles is sort of the limit with non-ham equipment (say, GMRS or CB), even with a decent (but not super-high or elaborate) antennas. Yes, the devil is in the many details. We discuss various distances (but forget about sat phones… it just doesn’t come up.

Then we talk about Ribbit, a new ‘technology’ for generating a text-based data signal on a smart phone that can be sent over a variety of medium - radio, VoIP - with ‘acoustic coupling’ - just holding the phone up to the mic and hitting ‘send’. It’s early days, and the technique may be a solution in search of a problem, but sometimes it works. They have a YouTube Video demonstrating the technology.,

Note that we had some trouble with our YouTube stream (again), and I’ve uploaded the recording to YouTube to avoid the buffering. Instead, you get a too-long discussion about the problem. Feel free to fast-forward (like you don’t do that already).

It’s just us - Jim NO1PC, David W0DHG and Gary K4AAQ for the Halloween Eve show. So, Extreme Elmering? We talk about that, after checking out Kyle AA0Z’s recent Trivia show, and a story in the LA Times about hams in Taiwan maybe preparing for a showdown with China.

And a reminder that when we do a ‘Promo’ show, it’s not just to tell you we have a ‘real’ show coming up. We usually do a whole ‘nother show. 30 minutes… or more. This week is defiantly in the more category. So if this nearly 2½ hour episode isn’t enough, to watch the Promo.

Here’s the Ham Radio Live show with HRN’s Gary K4AAQ as a guest. A lot of early history of Gary’s production and streaming.

https://youtu.be/tzt7zQQcQ-A

Our guest is Larry Devoe K7HN. Larry hosts the Ham Radio Live show on YouTube, and produces a live show almost every day.

This episode includes the ‘Promo’ that Jim and Gary recorded on Saturday. And keep an eye out for the Ham Radio Live show in the HRN podcast feed that Larry did with Gary as his guest.

Don’t look it up… you won’t find it. Host Gary K4AAQ and his friend Jeff AC4ZO (SK) made it up during some previous HamRadioNow show. *QBC? means (according to them) “Are we in the middle of a Boring Conversation”?. And QBC (no question mark) means “We are in the middle of a boring conversation. Terminate immediately”.

BUT… that’s not what we talked about this week. We got a last minute guest: Kay Savetz K6KJN is the Program Manager, Special Collections at the Internet Archive, home of the Wayback Machine that has been collecting old websites since about the dawn of time.

Kay is charged with collecting pretty much any media about Amateur Radio that he can get people to send. With a loose definition of ‘media’. For example, if you have an old log book from your Novice days (like Gary does), Kay wants it.

If you have something to contribute, drop Kay a line at: [email protected]

LINKS:

Internet Archive Amateur Radio Collection (in progress)

Kay says this is just the early presentation of the vast material he’s been curating.

With nowhere particularly to go, we spent most of the show talking about an article in Field & Stream about the ‘Best Ham Radio’. Yes, Field & Stream.

We made up this title when the tropical storm remnants of Hurricane Ian were predicted to pass directly over the East Coast Studio (in the Shadow of Charlotte, at the foot of Mt. Belzoni). The track moved about 100 miles east and flooded Raleigh, instead. But of course, the serious devastation was in Cuba, Florida and coastal South Carolina.

We have our usual gang of hosts, Jim NO1PC, David W0DHG and Gary K4AAQ. And we’re joined by Christine Duez K4KJN, SEC for the West Central Florida Section, and Gordon Mooneyhan W4EGM, Public Information Coordinator for the South Carolina Section. Both were on the edge of the path that Ian took through Florida and South Carolina.

What is the BEST! HAM Band of 2022?

Just because that is a silly, unanswerable question that pokes fun at all the ham (and general media) BEST! lists that provide ample fodder for many, many (many) shows, that doesn’t mean we don’t give it a shot. And by the time we’re done, East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ unilaterally announces a winner!

Along the way, Gary, NorCal Host Jim NO1PC and West Coast Host David W0DHG are joined on the Zoom line by two live viewers: William K4ARX, and Kent N6WT. And the fun is in the journey, not the destination. We talk about a lot of stuff, some of it even useful.

Another busy weekend…

David W0DHG was up on Missile Mountain doing an Interop Drill, while Gary K4AAQ was helping with the video from the 2022 ARRL/TAPR DCC, in his hometown this year. David and Jim get into the weeds on Emcom in CA