K0SWE Blog

Last weekend I attended the RMHAM-U lecture series and heard a talk by Doug Tabor N6UA about working amateur satellites, or AMSAT. I had been exposed to the idea while studying for the exams, but hadn't really given much serious thought to actually doing it. The talk was illuminating in terms of operating concepts and concrete operating procedures. It turns out, there's a pretty low barrier to entry to get into AMSAT since it's low power, line of site, and many satellites use UHF and VHF where even technician licensees can operate. Something as simple as an HT with a long whip antenna can suffice. The tricky parts are pass prediction, antenna tracking and Doppler shift. Pass prediction is made vastly simpler by smartphone apps, but the satellites don't always pass directly overhead, so some orienteering is required. Tracking, i.e. pointing the antenna, can be done by hand, but if you're operating by yourself then the antenna always uses up one hand. Then there...

It's slowly become clear that my penchant for Chromebooks (cheap and simple to manage) will not get me far in amateur radio. After  asking the internet for recommendations  and getting a lot great advice, I picked up a Panasonic Toughbook CF-19 MK5. It's 8 year old hardware at this point, but: it sounds like most ham applications don't require much in the way of CPU or memory,  the IP65 water resistance and general indestructibility is a big plus,  and they're a bargain at ~$300.  Compare that to a brand new "spill-resistant" Lenovo X1 Carbon at $1,500! I've installed Xubuntu 19.10 on it, and the experience was pretty seamless. A couple of notes: The touchscreen works, although I can't figure out how to calibrate it yet. As usual, I'm asking the internet . The speaker didn't work directly after install, but after playing around in alsamixer and raising all of the channel levels, I was able to get it working. The front buttons do...

I've been operating for a couple of months with a Diamond MR77, a UHF/VHF mag mount. It's been great as a temporary solution, but not ideal for sustained use because the coax cable must be routed carefully or else get pinched in the door. So today, I took a permanent step to advertising my car as a mobile ham shack and installed an NMO mount. It's a hard mount that requires drilling a hole in the car roof and routing the cable behind trim panels. That made it a much more extensive car project than I usually get into, but I decided to take it on. I have a 2010 Ford Fusion; getting the headliner loose in the back required removing the interior trim panels for the entire B pillars and C pillars, which was no small task. I thought I also needed to remove the rear dome light, and broke both retainer tabs in the process. It turns out it's sandwiched around the headliner, not attached to the roof, so there was no need to take it apart. With the NMO mount installed, I...