Radio, Amateurishly

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 ...

  A popular story goes something like this. The bumblebee, according to the laws of aerodynamics, is incapable of flight. The bumblebee is too dumb to know anything about the laws of aerodynamics. She doesn't know she can't fly, so she flies. The story has been debunked , owing to a misunderstanding of how insect wings generate lift, but it still is a fun and sometimes illustrative story. My amateur radio experience, now well into its sixth year, sometimes resembles the story of the bumblebee's flight. I'm not exactly a rookie—I've been a shortwave listener since the late '70s—but I have considerably less experience than a lot of my fellow hams in the art of sending and receiving signals over the air, and doing so efficiently. I'm doing almost everything incorrectly, and yet somehow I manage to make QSOs. I have QSLs from 102 DXCC countries 1 . I've worked my QTH's antipode. I've talked to the International Space Station. Against all odds, I...