Radio, Amateurishly

You've almost certainly seen the comic. A man and a woman are seated at a restaurant table on what is in all likelihood a date—a first date at that. Making small talk, the woman asks, "What's your favorite band?" The man replies, "Twenty meters." It's an English-language double entendre that's hard to resist having a little fun with. So let's have some fun. Here is a list of amateur radio bands described in terms of musical bands. The list is incomplete and definitely is not definitive. Feel free to fill in the ones that I missed, or come up with other ideas for the ones I included.  This is also the least serious thing I've ever written, so if I said anything untoward about your favorite band—or your favorite band—it was all in fun.  In truth, all of the bands have something to offer. 6 meters - U2 Six meters disappoints way more often than it doesn't, but we keep coming back to it, just hoping against hope that we'll be there when t...

  I still recall vividly how my least favorite type of homework assignment in the third grade (to be sure, I disliked all homework assignments in third grade) was when we would be given a sheet with a long list of scrambled words that the student had to unscramble. I didn't see the point in it. It seemed to be just so much busywork, a way to prevent us from frittering away too much of our afternoons watching cartoons or replicating Evel Knievel's latest stunt on our bicycles using crude jump ramps made from plywood and two-by-fours. What it didn't seem like was something with any intrinsic pedagogical value. When my daughter was in third grade, she came to me with a homework assignment that she was struggling with. I looked at the sheet she handed me and saw to my horror that nothing had changed in thirty years. Third grade teachers still loved assigning long lists of scrambled words to unscramble, and I still had a hard time discerning the pedagogical value of it all. It w...

  A three-stage rocket propels a spacecraft and its occupants to a docking with a wheel-shaped rotating space station. The occupants disembark and spend an indeterminate, although presumably short, period of time in the relative comfort of the station's artificial gravity before boarding a second spacecraft. The second spacecraft undocks, makes a single trans-lunar insertion burn, and three days later completes a soft landing on the surface of the Moon. By now you're probably thinking that yes, you've seen that movie at least a half dozen times—maybe even read the book—but this isn't a description of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey , or of Stanley Kubrick's visualization of 2001 . In 1959, nearly a decade before the Clarke/Kubrick book-and-movie combo, Mae and Ira Freeman published a story of an Earth orbit rendezvous Moon mission in their illustrated children's book You Will Go to the Moon . The story's protagonist is a young boy who goes on...

  I haven't flown Southwest Airlines in years, and with each passing year it becomes increasingly unlikely that I ever again will. The open seating plan is a cattle call. They cancel flights at the drop of a hat. They're not really all that much cheaper than the Big Three US-based carriers these days. Then there was that time a Southwest pilot with an open mic was caught deriding California's Bay Area and its people which, as I wrote about at the time , seemed to reveal a bit more than the company would like for us to know about what they really think of their passengers. The one thing Southwest had going for them, the company's longstanding commitment to including two checked bags with each regular fare, is now out the window . It all paints a picture of a corporate culture that can barely hide its disdain for us, like Randal (Jeff Anderson) in the 1994 Kevin Smith film Clerks when he says, "This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers"...

  I've worked VHF FM from one end of a car park to the other. I've worked a maritime mobile station that was within 1500 kilometers of being antipodal to my QTH. I've cherished every single contact but, as I discussed in a blog article a few years back, a big part of what got me interested in amateur radio was the opportunity to talk all over the world. Included among the more than 100 countries I've had the opportunity to work 1 , are countries like China, Cuba, and even Russia that have historically had contentious relationships with the United States. These contacts are an important part of amateur radio's value proposition; our governments might have their differences, responsibilities for those differences might even be asymmetrical, but through amateur radio we have the chance to make one-to-one contacts based on our mutual enjoyment of this shared activity. Seasoned US-based operators might not consider VE contacts to be DX, but that hasn't detracted fro...

My most recent Parks on the Air (POTA) activation, an overnighter at Chino Hills State Park US-1139 on the weekend of 15 and 16 February, 2025, was a blast, but not without its challenges. During the evening hours, US Pacific time, I experienced a mysterious increase in SWR, and a resultant decrease in transmit power as my transmitter automatically rolled back the power to protect itself. It cost me at least one QSO, as I heard a station repeatedly trying to reply to my CQ with me unable to complete the exchange. As I like to say, I'm not a real engineer. I'm a graduate of a liberal arts school and a software engineer by trade. Someone more knowledgeable might be able to expand upon—or refute—my analysis of what happened. For now, here's what I think went wrong. Background Contest The weekend in question was the weekend of the ARRL International DX Contest, CW. The CW portions of the non-WARC bands were wall to wall with contest participants, making frequency selection for ...