Unfortunately, I was only able to participate in QRPTTF 2012 for a short while – not enough time to justify an outdoor excursion.
The MO here was to operate from the home QTH with the rig at 5 watts, spot those I heard/worked to QRPSpots in order to drum up some business for them and then to record them as MP3 files. Over the years, I’ve periodically received emailed MP3′s of how I sounded at some distant location and like to provide the same every now and then. Continue reading 'QRP to the Field – 2012'»
KT5X operating QRP @ 14,040' on Handies Peak, with ATS-3, LiPo battery & EFHW antenna. Click for larger.
The mountaineering trio of Guy N7UN, Steve wG0AT and Fred KT5X are now back to oxygen-rich atmospheres of lower elevations and, hopefully, collating their photos and memories into write-ups and a video.
Although they couldn’t know it, as I worked Fred and Guy, I had just finished a landline QSO with another ham who is also a QRPer…but who enjoys QRP in a completely different way. Dan WG5G is on the DXCC Honor Roll, having worked 338 countries with 5 watts.
The range of interests and possibilities within the sub-category of QRP is both amazing and indicative of the variety and versatility we have at our disposal at being proficient with low-powered equipment. Continue reading 'Dual aspects of QRP'»
As I endured another day of 104F/40C heat yesterday, a trio of QRPers offered me vicarious relief from 14,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies.
Guy N7UN, Fred KT5X and Steve wG0AT had hiked up Handies Peak and set up shop on 20 meters at the edge of a 2000-foot cliff. Their signal roared in with all the strength that such an elevation would imply. So with Audacity running on the computer, I clicked the mouse and recorded our QSO (below, and transcribed).
As I ponder their enjoyment of such an excursion, Continue reading 'Mountaintop QSO'»
How’s that for a descriptive title?
If it hadn’t been for Cam Hartford N6GA’s QRP column in CQ Magazine, I would never have know about a very unique QRP rig and the brains behind it.
If you’re ready to end your web-surfing session for now, do yourself a favor first Continue reading 'W1JSB’s cool SW-20/80-based outdoor QRP rigs'»
(Apologies to Mr. Pirsig…)
Portability is becoming more & more popular in HF today and I don’t mean in the sense of the KX1, Micro-Mountaineer, SST and other CW-only transceivers of yore.
Portable operation on HF in a variety of modes is now an established genre of ham radio rather than the fad it at one time may have seemed and its adherents have an increasingly wide choice of radios and modes with which to operate.
In a case of perfect timing, the trend in technology allowing such portability coincides with the growing housing restrictions regarding external antennas, thus providing incentive for such operation. Continue reading 'Plato and the art of HF portability'»
Even as my new smart phone continues to prove its worth, new justifications for its purchase keep trickling in.
I’ve been using QRPSPOTS (on the computer, in the shack) for a while now to find out who’s operating afield but will soon need a way to post spots from afield myself. From Guy N7UN’s tutorial here, Martin VA3SIE’s here and from a recently-downloaded app for Twitter called Seesmic, I think I’ll be good to go in short order. Continue reading 'Twitter and QRPSPOTS'»
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