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Ham radio as a hobby can be amazing at times when conditions are right and all of your equipment is tuned right and you are in a low electrical noise location.  And at other times it can be very frustrating when things go wrong.  No sun spots for good propagation.  High SWR for some unknown reason, etc…  I recently experienced both sides of the hobby – here’s my story.

I had a dentist appointment in Green Bay, Wisconsin recently and the 30 mile or so drive from Appleton, Wisconsin gave me time to do some HF work with my mobile HF radio.  Running just 100 watts into a less than sturdily mounted “ham stick” antenna on 20 meters I made an outstanding contact with a ham radio base station in France!  For some time after that I nearly gloated to myself about how lucky I was to be able to enjoy this hobby and how everything was working so well.  Bad move!

A couple of weeks later I was driving home from work and flipped from 2 meters over to 20 meters.  The band was surprisingly quiet!  Was it due to low solar activity?  AND – there was surprisingly little traffic on the band.  A few people, but not many.  Hmmm…  I started to get a bad feeling…  I went to an open part of the band and made a quick transmission with my call sign with one eye on the SWR indicator on the radio’s display mounted on my dash.  There it was – a flashing “SWR” – I probably had an antenna problem.

Well, I had mounted the antenna on the trunk in a snow storm and tuned it when it was around zero degrees Fahrenheit…  Not a time that LockTite epoxy would work on the mounting set screws.  Surely the mount had lost it’s ground connection.  So I popped the trunk and checked it out – good tight connections…  hmmm…

When I closed the trunk I noticed – the tunable radiating element (the adjustable length whip at the top of the antenna) had become a LOT shorter.  A closer inspection showed that the two set screws that held the antenna to the tuned length at the top of the antenna had been shaken or vibrated out.  Made sense.  That antenna is quite long and whips around in the wind at highway speeds quite a bit.  So I presumed I would be in HF withdrawal until I could find someone with an expensive antenna analyzer that could help me re-tune the antenna.

Ahh but I was wrong!  On another drive back from Green Bay, Wisconsin I decided to just listen on 20 meters.  Surely I would hear nothing, but I was bored…  To my surprise I listened to some quite strong and clear traffic between Georgia, USA and Vancouver, Canada during the 2010 Winter Olympics!  To my mind – it shouldn’t have worked, but it did…  It was quite a surprise.  And it gave me cause to check other bands, including shortwave bands, to see what else I was missing!

As of this post, I still have not found the correct size replacement set screws for the antenna…  grumble grumble…  The good news is that the air temps are warming and it will soon be warm enough to cement the set screws in place once I do acquire them.

Stay radio active!

Jon Kreski, AB9NN

http://www.HamRadioResources.com

http://www.Twitter.com/AB9NN

Here is a link that Jane, Kd8KRS (my lovely wife and a ham) passed along to me.  http://www.globaltuners.com/home.php  This site looks to be a good site for those that wonder what it would be like to 1) operate someone else’s ham radio from a distance via the Internet and 2) listen to a ham or shortwave radio in a different location.

This site looks to have about 60 radios that you can use via the Internet.  It does require that you create a user account and it does require approval by an administrator.  That is a bit of a disappointment for an eager radio enthusiast that wants to get started using the radios right away.  But, all good things come in time they say.

This will be a quick, short post to let any ham radio operators and short wave listeners or just those that wonder what it’s all about know that this resource is available.

Stay radio active!

Jon Kreski, AB9NN

http://www.HamRadioResources.com

http://www.Twitter.com/AB9NN

New years day is a day to reflect on the past year and to embrace new beginnings or the new year.  This pastyear has brought me many fun new experiences on new ham bands (for me) like 20 meters, getting my A.P.R.S. tracker insalled, configured and functional and getting to know the electical noise and propagation characteristics of a new home.  New year’s resolutions include the commitment to explore, learn and implement WinLink (and probably other digital modes) and to research training in Morse code.  I also plan to build a base station in our new home.  And I commit to fully implement electronic logging via eQSL and perhaps other services.

I hope that you will take a fresh look at your ham radio operations.  The hobby is so diverse and can be so technical that no one should ever feel they “know it all”.   Find those areas that you don’t know much about and find out if they are of interest to you.  I see many hams not doing this.  They become bored and drop out… With that said…

Stay Radio Active!

Jon Kreski, AB9NN

http://www.HamRadioResources.com

http://www.Twitter.com/AB9NN