It has been awhile since I posted about the QTH so here goes. Beth and I moved in September 2022 to Clearwater, FL. We decided it was time to leave the beach. While it was certainly pretty looking over the water from the rocking chair on the deck, honestly the wind was getting a bit too much for me. Fortunately, the buyers wanted to leave the tower there so I did not have to arrange for that to come down. A few of the guys from SPARC came over the…
NY4I
It took 40 years, but I finally finished WAS on 10m to achieve 5B WAS. Actually, I already had WAS on 30 and 17 so I not have 7B WAS with just North Dakota and Mississippi needed on 12m (assuming I get a QSL on LOTW for an Oklahoma station I worked recently).
For awhile now I have wanted to be able to have my “Goodnight” scene in HomeAssistant turn off my network attached ham gear. I finally had a chance to do some experimenting and created this config to turn on and off the KPA1500.This sends a command via UDP to the amp to turn it off and uses Wake_On_LAN to turn it on. A similar thing could be added for other device types. This is added to the configuration.yaml file. Put your real MAC address of the amp next to mac. If you mac address is…
*** There is now an Add-On for the Kohler Generator. *** I have been playing around with Home Assistant (HA). Briefly, it is a management system for IoT and other devices that is hosted internally (on a Raspberry Pi in my ham shack). With Home Assistant, it is natural to look for all the things that are already programmed to connect with and check their status. I already have the following items in Home Assistant: Lutron Caseta Switches Wemo Switches Rain Machine Sprinkler Controller Honeywell WiFI Thermostats Pi-Hole SensorPush temperature…
While it pains me to say it, the cable Internet service is fairly reliable here. The one BIG exception is when we have power outages. One can imagine that Spectrum has never heard of a UPS to use on their router along the way between each home and their cable plant. When we get power outages here in Madeira Beach due to thunderstorms, it is not unusual for the Internet to go out. Sometimes it is just a few seconds and other times it has gone into the minutes. We…
Just a note for anyone else searching for UDM Pro No Internet Detected issue. I have a Netgear cable modem so it is not a router at all. I installed the UDM Pro but it could never get to the Internet. I searched and found some references to setting the time but my time was correct. I then read something about the UDM Pro wanting to get to “something” but not telling us what. For some reason, that clicked as a potential DNS issue. Sure enough, on the Advanced options…
The ARRL’s DXCC Challenge Award is earned by working and confirming at least 1,000 DXCC band-points on any Amateur bands, 160 through 6 meters (except 60 meters). So each combination of DXCC entity and band is one point. Work Germany on 5 bands, you get 5 points. The basic award is 1000 points but I never applied for that one. Several months ago I saw I was close to 1500 points so I thought I would wait to I reach 1500 (endorsements are in 500 point increments) and then apply for the award and…
ADS-B is a method where planes broadcast their position data. I did a presentation for the Clearwater Amateur Radio Society about the technology and how I built a system myself for mounting on my tower. Here is the link to the presentation. [ny4i-next-meeting day=”Saturday”]
Presentation I did for the Upper Pinellas Amateur Radio Club on some repeater basics. Understanding Repeaters