It has been quite a while since I’ve done an “internet spew” post, so here’s a bunch of exciting stuff flowing forth from the interwebz.
Mt Herman is the Most Radio Active (SOTA) Mountain in Colorado. I noticed there wasn’t a good writeup with how to hike and activate it, so I wrote this one up: Hiking Mt Herman for SOTA.
Broken Callsign
I keep an alert on my smartphone for whenever I get spotted on the ham bands. Mostly, this is a way to confirm that I get spotted when activating a SOTA summit. The other day, I was spotted on 20m CW, when I haven’t worked that band/mode in over a decade.
These spots came from the Reverse Beacon Network (RBN), so I pulled the spot data from RBN for that day (483,362 spots). A little bit of searching revealed there were spots for K0NF on almost the same frequency a few minutes off in time going 37 to 40 wpm. Miss one dit and you get K0NR. Mystery solved.
Marconi Station
Last week, I visited the site of the Marconi station on Cape Cod that made the first transatlantic two-way wireless contact. There is not much there…just a stone marker. Yes, I understand Marconi was not real active on VHF.
Legos and Ham Radio
I came across this video of a clever Lego project with a ham radio theme:
ICQ Podcast Interviews the ARRL CEO
This ICQ podcast includes Frank Howell (K4FMH) interveiwing the ARRL CEO and Secretary Howard Michel (WB2ITX), who provides an update from the recent ARRL committee meeting. I like Howard’s style and appreciate his willingness to engage with radio hams.
Regulation By Bandwidth
Dan/KB6NU writes that the ARRL renewed its request to the FCC to replace the symbol rate rule on digital transmissions and move to regulating by bandwidth. On the surface, this seems like a no-brainer thing to do: regulating by symbol rate is archaic and limits the use of new, more efficient modulation techniques. But drill in deeper and you’ll find there are legitimate concerns about protecting narrowband emissions (e.g., CW) and not allowing automated stations to dominate the ham bands. Still, it seems like a reasonable approach can be found. Stay tuned on this one.
73 Bob K0NR