In preparation for a remote POTA and CQ WPX SSB outing, I wanted a case for my Elecraft K4D. After looking around for anyone that may have used a Pelican case, I stumbled upon a reference to Elecraft’s web site where they have a soft-side case for the K4. It comes with foam to surround the radio. As it is soft-side, it is not made to be checked but who would do that to a K4? This is one where the radio will be with you either in an overhead…
Posts published in “Hardware”
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…
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…
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…
I have started playing with ADS-B data again. For those that do not know, ADS-B is a system where planes send their position, speed, heading and other telemetry to the ground via a radio on typically 1090 Mhz. This is unencrypted data that anyone with a receiver and antennas can pickup and use. The above chart is generated by the PiAware software running on a Raspberry Pi 3B. The planes and position reports you see are all received locally by me with a small antennas sitting on the window sill…
Part of any new radio release is a treasure-trove of commentary on the new radio’s email reflector. This is a summary of those topics so when you order your new radio you can recognize some of these common patterns. I started this with the Icom 9700 and it has been true for every new radio since then. Discussion if the rumored radio will actually be sold and when. General hand-wring regarding the vendor’s included/missing features. Consternation regarding how long it is taking to release anything. The inevitable price guessing (and…
Thanks to Clayton KJ4RUS going up the tower along with ground crew Bob N2ESP, Pat AA0O and Ed NZ1Q, I have a wire antennas on the tower. Clayton climbed the tower to put a rope in the tower standoff’s pulley and the ground crew connected things so the antennas could be raised. The ends were tied off and it all seems to work well. The picture below is of a contact I made on FT8 showing the coverage of the antennas on 20 meters. This looks like a great pattern…
Overview of the parts involved in the tower build
The concrete is in the ground secured by a good amount of concrete. The contractor that rebuilt the house is doing the base and house brackets for this project. We had some false starts on the hole. Specifically, the first one they dug was too far from the house relative to the house bracket. The second hole was too far from the house in the other direction (the house bracket would have hung over). I really do not understand why it is so hard to look at a set of…