Radio, Amateurishly

In October of 2020, my home QTH of Yorba Linda, California was under threat from the Blue Ridge Fire . Our home was never under an evacuation order and, if I'm honest with myself, was never very close to being under an evacuation order. Still, it was a harrowing few days, especially when the dark of night made the flames on distant hillsides visible from our kitchen window. I spent quite a bit of time monitoring the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), particularly during the hours when an extended power outage meant that I couldn't get any work done. I listened with the sense of duality familiar to anyone who has used a scanner or monitored utility stations on HF: at once deeply concerned for the lives and property of my neighbors while also fascinated at the spectacle of firefighting tankers flying over my house while my FT-70D's speaker crackled with plans about where the next line of fire retardant would be dropped.  By any measure, CAL FI...

This week the amateur radio satellite community was saddened to learn that Wade Stuart, N0TEL, had gone silent key. Those of us who had the opportunity to contact Wade on the radio knew him as an exemplary operator, an all around nice guy, and a prolific rover. Amateur radio operators sometimes use the Maidenhead Locator System , which divides the earth's surface into grid squares , to describe location. A set of latitude and longitude coordinates describes a single point on the earth; a grid square describes a region. I live in grid square DM13. San Francisco is in CM87, Chicago is in EN61, and most of New York is in FN30. For those amateur radio operators who like to communicate via satellite (there are dozens of satellites on orbit with amateur radio payloads), certificates and awards can be earned by contacting stations in as many grid squares as possible. Some operators will travel ( roving , in amateur radio parlance) to sparsely populated grid squares for the purpose of giv...

I enjoy writing, and got to be reasonably good at it in college. I went into a line of work where, aside from occasional technical documentation, I don't get to write much. I'm hoping this will be a sort of outlet. I'm an amateur radio operator, call sign W6KSR. I expect, in keeping with the write-about-what-you-know adage, that I'll be writing about amateur radio quite a bit here, but there may be other topics as well. If you know me from amateur radio, you know I've ardently striven to separate amateur radio from sex, religion, and politics; I've always considered the avoidance of those subjects to be sound and courteous practice. I can't make a similar promise about this blog. In the never-ending search for stuff to write about, I may let it slip that I voted for candidate X or candidate Y in the recent election. You might find out what I've learned about climate change or the origin of the universe, or what I think about FCC filing fees for amateur r...

Several years  ago,  I read Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See f or a book club we had at my office.  The meaning of the title is layered—the protagonist, for one thing, is blind—but the closest thing to a title drop occurs when one of the characters, while growing up  in prewar Germany, listens to a broadcast from a privately-owned (pirate?) shortwave radio station in France. The broadcast is a children’s science lesson, and the topic is the electromagnetic spectr um and how  much of it lies outside the range of human sensory experience.    I had a sixth-grade teacher who would often talk about the number of radio signals that were passing through the classroom at that very moment. Broadcasters, air traffic contro l, police and fire, military communications, ship-to-shore: all of it crossing that  room in southern California in all different directions without any of us being aware of it. The world—and by extension the universe—was seem...