Millington QSL Card from 1951

Another acquisition for my quirky radio-related collecting hobby (vintage QSL cards from places I’ve actually lived or visited at some point in real life). 
This card is from 1951 in the place where I was born: the naval base in Millington, Tennessee.
The sender was operating from Milington, and the ham he sent the card to lived in North Carolina. The distance between these two stations was approximately 468 miles as the crow flies. 
#QSLcard #KE0FFT #KE0FFTqslCard

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Winter Field Day 2022

I got out very briefly this past Sunday (Jan 30th) to at least set-up for Winter Field Day. I figured I could at least learn some lessons about portable setup with the Yaesu FT-857D. 

I drove around Red Hills State Park and chose a spot near the lake not far from the old abandoned restaurant. 

In addition to the 857d, I brought the Tecsun S-2000, a weather radio, a QRP tri-bander, the Anytone 878uv HT, and a handheld scanner. I set up a long wire antenna for the Tecsun, and a GR5V-Jr for the Yaesu. 

First thing that I heard was Voice of America in Somali from England with a decent signal. Next, I decided to try some QRP CW. I had a station that heard and came back to me from Georgia, but I was lost in the QRN after that. Than I made contact with another QRP portable station located at Beaver Dam State Park - also in Illinois. 

I had to work early the next morning, so it was already time to break camp and head home to get some ZZZZzzz’s. A local ham radio and fellow former Air Force friend from Olney had stopped by to see the setup. He helped me get everything back into the car and that was that. 

Lessons learned: remember to bring whatever you need to get the antenna up high. Bring more ink pens and fewer radios. Probably one HT, one HF and the weather radio will be plenty. Get set up early on day one and camp out overnight. Get a lighter portable power setup - what I have is too heavy and requires too many pieces of equipment. 

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Light Up “On Air” Sign

My sister made this color-changing light up sign for my shack today. If you’d be interested in something similar, she can pretty much create whatever pattern you want as long as it can fit in the space.

Check out her Facebook page here: 

https://www.facebook.com/RefindCrafts/

Useful Morse Code Practice Sites

 

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Learn CW Online

This site will allow you to paste a limited amount of text from anywhere into a text box and then play it back in CW at whatever speed and tone you set up. I used this site a lot back in 2013 when I first thought about getting back into amateur radio after a 20+ year hiatus. It has a lot of cool features and can really help with building your speed and getting an idea of where you stand currently with your copying ability. You can find my profile here: https://lcwo.net/profile/Skunkroot

https://lcwo.net/

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Morse Code News 4.4

Morse News periodically reads one or more RSS/Atom (news) and/or Twitter timelines/direct messages then translates the received messages into precisely timed International (radio) or American (railroad) Morse code. The Morse code can be played as CW radio tones, old-fashioned spark-gap sounds, telegraph sounder click/clack sounds, or to a physical telegraph sounder connected to a serial port. Split speeds are supported for Farnsworth effects. American code generation includes timing nuances that make it sound natural. The CW and spark-gap sounds can optionally be enhanced with realistic noise, static crashes, and ionospheric-style Raleigh fading.

Version 4.4 adds TLS 1.2 encryption for RSS, expanded info on RSS feeds, plus new and revised default feeds. V4.3 Added TLS 1.2 for Twitter. Version 4.2 is a major update, please see the release notes in the help page for the many changes and new features .Version 4.1 adds Twitter direct message support to Morse News, inspired by Garry Tidler WW9GT. Version 4.0 has many new features including low-latency ASIO sound support, inspired by Chuck Vaughan AA0HW for crisp keying at QRQ speeds, all new handling of feeds with a feed connectivity and content checker.

http://morse-rss-news.sourceforge.net/

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I found this site today because my favorite CW app (Ham Morse) seems to have gone offline. I was looking for another place to get Morse news headlines. At first glance, it looks like this is actually a group of live-stream links that are constantly streaming CW headlines at different speeds. Nice resource for practice there. It looks like this is a site that is affiliated with FISTs somehow? But I'm not sure.

http://cw.dimebank.com:8080/

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New Colorado Hams - August 2015

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Just found my name mentioned on a blog post about new Colorado hams - I'm looking forward to taking a more active role in the amateur radio community once I've got a radio up and running. That might be a while yet. Meanwhile, welcome to all the other new Colorado hams!

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