As Hurricane Helene bears down on Florida and Georgia, please be mindful of our brother and sister Amateur Radio ops who will be manning their radios on behalf of public safety. Some HF frequencies to be aware of:
Some Florida Nets
South Florida ARES Net3.940
North Florida ARES Net3.950
Northern Florida ARES Net (NFAN):
9:00 AM Eastern time Monday through Saturday Frequencies are 7.198 MHz. Backup on 7.242 and 7.265 MHz, all LSB-
Hurricane Watch Net
14.325 MHz and 7.268 MHz
To ALL our friends in the Southeast who are in Helene's path ...... our prayers are with you. Take care, be safe and may God be with you.
For those of you who love the season, that is. For me, it's an occasion to symbolically shed a tear for Summer. I'm not into falling leaves or pumpkin spiced coffee, although I do love pumpkin bread and pumpkin pie and Thanksgiving. Autumn for me is juat a harbinger of what is to come ....Winter. Yuck! Give me Spring or Summer any day of the week. Shortly, I'll be back in three layer season - long Tee, golf shirt and sweat shirt on top of it all.
I mention all this because I am hoping to spend some time this afternoon at the patio table with the QMX and the AX1. A little more experimentation. However, when I went outside this morning to take some trash and recycling to their respective receptacles, I noticed it was downright chilly! When I came back inside, the console of my weather station reported that it was 60F. Not cold by any means, but it was accompanied by a breeze that made it feel colder than reality. And these earlier sunsets are a bane to my happiness as well.
So I may have to don a sweatshirt when I sit outside later today. I didn't get on the air yesterday, just too many things got in the way. I'm hoping to see how the QMX, 4 States tuner and the AX1 play together to see if they provide a usable possibility when Marianne and I head for Upstate NY. I will also have the AlexLoop, Buddistick and the KM4CFT EFRW along for the ride, but if the AX1 gives me some decent results, that would be an option for picnic table operating from the state parks up there.
I'll let you know how it went.
Question for my fellow QRPers. As I was not able to sit down behind a radio yesterday .... was there any QRP Afield activity to speak of? Let me know in the comments, please!
I've decided to make the 4States QRP Group 4S-Tuner the official tuner of the W2LJ QMX Portable Ops bag. So I ordered another one for the shack for when I use the HW-8. This way, I don't have to keep transferring the one I have back and forth between car and shack.
I really, really like the function of the two LEDs. Great design feature by David Wayne Cripe NM0S!
When the red one is bright and the green one is out, the SWR is too high. When the two LEDs are of equal brightness, you have a 2:1 SWR. When the green LED is at max brightness, and the red LED is at minimum brightness or out altogether, your SWR is around 1:1.
This is a T-Match Tuner and I find it a bit easier to use, having the inductor in the circuit. Nothing against the ZM-2 as it is a wonderful little unit and will stay in the KX3 bag, should the autotuner fail for whatever reason. But sometimes, I just have a bit of trouble getting that single red LED to dim. I guess it's range is just a little narrower than the 4S-Tuner.
I already know it works well with my KM4CFT EFRW antenna. This weekend, time and weather permitting, I'd like to see how it handles the AX1 from our patio tabletop - a simulated POTA activation. Have to practice, just like the astronauts did! HI HI !
Onto another subject, with all the CMEs and solar flares that have been occurring the past few weeks, I saw this photo on Facebook, taken just yesterday, from the 1,000 Islands region in Upstate NY.
Marianne and I are heading up there soon for some away time for our Anniversary - I know I've mentioned that before. Will this finally be a good chance for me to see the Northern Lights? I hope so! If I'm lucky enough, I'll try to get some photos.
While I'm on the subject of photos - here's a neat one I came across the other day, for the QRP Image of the Day. This was posted on Facebook by Chris Farnham W1YTQ. He was camping with his son's scout troop in Boston Harbor Island up in Massachusetts and one of the licensed Scouts actually accomplished his first POTA activation. Later, after the hustle and bustle of the day was over, Chris decided to stroll on down to the beach to activate - Boston Islands Park - US-2421, himself.
Isn't that a beauty of a shot? The moon and it's reflection on the water, the KH1 with the antenna sticking up, and that cube-ish lantern. What a great mood shot! And once again, it shows that you don't have to tote around a whole mess of equipment to have a good time!
Hurricane Francine strengthened overnight and has become better organized. It’s expected to further strengthen over the Gulf of Mexico before landfall in Louisiana later today.
A couple of years ago, I put an Adafruit MagTag Weather display together. The MagTag was a fairly inexpensive CircuitPython device with an eInk display and built-in WiFi. It used a free (at that time) service called OpenWeatherMap API
Within the past month, OpenWeatherMap changed their policy and now requires a credit card to validate the API key, but they still don’t charge for up to 1,000 API calls per day. Their interface allows you to set restrictions on the maximum API calls per day (it defaults to 2,000). In my case I set it down to 500, so I never have to worry about a software bug causing me to get billed.
The code.py program that Adafruit supplies currently, is out of date, as it uses the API 2.5, which has been replaced by API 3.0. The change needed to the source file is trivial – simply change the line that has the 2.5 reference to 3.0 and you are all done. Like this:
This livestream recording is from September 1, 2024 – the NW7US Radio Communications Channel Livestream. We do this livestream every Sunday at 21:15 UTC. Here is the link to the livestream from this past Sunday: The livestream list is here: https://www.youtube.com/@nw7us/streams I hope to see you in our livestream live chat, during the next session […]
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