Ground Rod Resistance
Here’s a great video showing how depth and soil type affect the resistance of a ground rod. The video is geared towards linemen however the same rules apply to grounding an Amateur Radio station....
K4NHA Blog
K4SCO 147.36 Repeater Relocation
For the past year my local organization, Jackson County ARES/RACES, has been struggling to find a home for our SKYWARN linked repeater. Earlier in 2015 the tower owners kicked us out of the shack...
Inexpensive Mag Mount Weatherproofing
I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the cheaper magnet mount manufacturers like Browning and Tram since I became interested in radio back in the scanner days many years ago. My problems seem to always arise after...
A “Custom” Phonetic Alphabet
Stumbled across this the other day on Reddit I think, it’s someone’s phonetic alphabet. I’m very tempted to use this next week during my local repeater’s ragchew net and see what kind of responses...
BaofengTech UV2501+220 – Another Cheap Failure?
Recently BaofengTech released a new tri-band radio, the UV2501+220, which is a VHF/UHF mobile also covering the 222MHz band. The radio sounded great upon first glance considering it’s small size, 25 watt output (20...
Antenna Separation Calculators
I stumbled upon these two calculators while browsing Reddit last night. One is for horizontal separation and the other for vertical separation. Pretty handy if you have limited space in both of those axis...
New Radio: TYT TH-UV8000D
Thanks to KB4RMA ordering a 2-pack of these I have a new radio to test, a TYT TH-UV8000D. The radio is a 10w/5w VHF/UHF with all of the normal features you see on the...
RaspberryPi Satellite Tracker
Let’s look at a program used to track the hundreds of satellites in Low Earth Orbit, Gpredict. While this software can be used to track any satellite we’ll focus primarily on satellites with transceivers or...
RaspberryPi Introduction
This week begins a weekly series of posts related to the RaspberryPi and useful programs for Amateur Radio. If you aren’t familiar with the RaspberryPi this will be an introduction to what it is...
