I am planning a trip and have been checking some of my weather resources that I provide links to on www.HamRadioResources.com . One that I start with gives me a really nice three day overview of severe weather threats. You probably get this information from your local TV weather. But here is probably where THEY get their information from! Click here to view the site. It’s from the Severe Storms Forecast Center in Norman, Oklahoma. The upper portion of the website gives you plenty of information on current happenings. But scroll down a screen or so. You will see three maps. One for today. One for tomorrow. And one for the next day. Double click the day’s map you are interested in. Then mouse-over the hot links to show the % probabilities for each type of severe weather threat for that time period.

Forecasts generally are not all that accurate more than three days out. I start here to see what is comming a few days ahead of time. Then as the threats get closer I use other tools. I will cover them later.

Enjoy this one and stay safe! You can use these resources for ham radio SkyWarn operations…

Jon Kreski, AB9NN
Owner
www.HamRadioResources.com

My girlfriend recently took a picture of me and then told me that she thought it would look nice on my website at www.HamRadioResources.com , so I uploaded it. Thought you might want to have a look. In the non-ham world I am an Auditor for SCA Tissue in Neenah, WI. It’s a fun job with great people and it lets me afford my ham radio equipment. And - I get to do some ham listening and talking on my commute and on my lunch break.

Getting the photo to show up on the website was a bit or an adventure. I use a table on the index page and in the section that the photo is in it has three columns. The photo was sized larger than the column it was in, so the browser refused to show the photo. I would have thought that it would have shown the portion that would fit, but I guess now.

OK - I hope the photo shows up well for you!

Jon Kreski, AB9NN
Owner
www.HamRadioResources.com

Last weekend I was driving up to WalMart to pick some things up and had the FT-857d mobile in scan mode as I drove. I heard the usual police band chatter, somone on a repeater, so ariline traffic, and then it stopped on 164.520 - the National Calling Frequency in the 2 meter band. Hmmm…. someone passing by on the local freeway I thought. Or maybe a base station looking for DX contacts? Wasn’t sure what it was. Both sides of the conversation were nice and clear.

I took the radio out of scan mode to listen a bit. I had put this frequency in the memory bank some time ago and had only heard one other conversation on it. Most mobiles use the repeaters if they know the tones, etc.. So what was this? I heard something about 31,000 feet over Madison, WI. Not a bad trip - good clean signal into my mobile in Appleton, WI. Must be mayb 150 miles… SWEET! There was a net going on. So I checked in and got a confirmation of my signal.

Turns out that this was a project of the University of Wisconsin Near Earth Space program. They said it was their 46th launch. This one with a good ham radio repeater on board. And it was in memory of a slient Key (deceased ham). I thought that was quite nice.

Ham radio is an interesting hobby. If you listen long enough you will surely find things of interest. I like the hobby because there are many different modes to explore and tons of different frequencies to use - all with their own propagation characteristics. If you have been a ham and maybe are not active as much as you have been - give a listen. You’ll be suprised what you run across. If you are not a ham, then contact the www.ARRL.org for information on how to get started.

Until next time,

73’s!

Jon Kreski, AB9NN
www.HamRadioResources.com