Eric K3FNB
Recently I’ve started using nushell for shell scripting. Nushell is an interesting shell because it supports structured data in the form of lists, records, and tables. A list is like a JSON array [1, 2, 3] A record is like a JSON object {name: "Eric", callsign: "K3FNB"} A table is like a CSV file or a SQL table. It has rows and columns. For instance, the typical ls command in Linux produces…
I’m a little late on this, but I thought I take the moment to write down some reflections on this past year and plan for the future. I’m coming up on finishing up my second year as a ham, and I’ve started thinking about what my goals for next year are going to be. I will do a more in depth retrospective and goal setting in March, but I wanted to think about what I would want to…
Ham Radio Solutions sells a $30 device that lets you connect your CW key to your phone or computer. It essentially acts as a keyboard that sends a left control or right control based on which side of a paddle you connect to. I wanted to be able to use my CW key with my Android phone for practicing on the go, but I didn’t really want to spend $30 to do that. I thought that I could build an…
# The Hike It has been a while since I went out on an activation on my own. We had a death in the family in the beginning of September, and my mental health took a noise dive. My weekends have been spent bed rotting and I haven’t had much energy to be radio active. I finally got the itch to spend some time in the park, so I managed to drag myself out of bed for a 1pm brunch at Café Sophie…
Last year, I made the overly ambitious goal to activate every POTA park in Maryland. I knew this would take years, but I really want to explore all of Maryland. So I scraped the data from the POTA website, sorted the parks by distance from home. I created this massive TODO.org file and got to work. I made it 10 parks in and realized that activating wildlife management zones are pretty boring. In…
I’ve gone to US-1589 Patuxent River State Park to try to activate the park with the QMX a few times since my last post. I’ve tried with a ground mounted 17’ whip and with my K6ARK 20m EFHW. I’ve yet to be able to activate it with the QMX. This is a frustrating park to activate with only 5W. I was able to activate US-1596 Seneca Creek Park on my lunch break with the QMX and…
I don’t have very many weekends free in August, so I needed to scope out the next park for August’s Coffee and POTA. As this was going to be a low pressure activation, I thought I’d try out the QMX. For August, I thought I’d return to Patuxent State Park . However, this time, I’d avoid the scary dirt road from my last activation. This time I thought I’d check…
Today was Rockville Science Center ’s monthly Coffee and POTA outing. We activated McKee-Breshers wildlife management area. It was a hot one today. I am very glad I brought out a 10x10 canopy. The 6-foot table and canopy worked out quite well for the group. I don’t think we would have survived the heat without the shade. My hope was that we’d be able to activate next to the…
Curiosity got the best of me. I wondered if keyboard switches would makes a good CW key. I type at a keyboard for a living, so it is only natural to wonder if tapping out CW with a keyboard like key would be familiar. So I wired up a prototype. This was made using two keyboard switches, a TRS jack, and the packaging for a key switch set I have. It works surprisingly well. I had to switch to Iambic…
I passed my technician’s test in March. I was given my first call sign, KC3YQI on 3/13/2024. I wanted to take some time to reflect on the past year and look ahead to see where I want to go next. # My journey to Extra Let’s go way back to my introduction to amateur radio. As a kid, I was obsessed with aviation. I’d spend hours flying around in Chuck Yeager’s Flight Simulator…
This Support Your Parks weekend was looking like it was going to be a cold one. The forecast at the start of the week was predicting below zero F temperatures. I was seriously considering staying home this weekend. Fortunately, when I woke up and checked the forecast I was pleasantly surprised. I saw that the high today was going to be 48F. That is practically balmy. I poured myself a cup of…
I wasn’t intending to activate a park today. Being New Years Day, I woke up pretty late. I saw KE8UTX and KE8QJV from the Black Swamp ARC pop up on my HamAlert, so I brewed some coffee and hunted them. The 20m band was really iffy at 18:50Z in MD. I can usually hear Ohio pretty well from Maryland, but they gave me a 53. As I was sipping my coffee, I wondered if there was an award for working…
NOTE: HYS did not pay me to promote this item. I bought these antennas with my own money and was happy to finally find a 8" BNC HT antenna For the longest time I’ve been searching for the ultimate BNC HT antenna. I want good 2m performance, OK 70cm performance, and if I can get less than 3:1 on the GMRS band, bonus. The Nagoya NA-701 has been that antenna for me. It isn’t as good as…
I didn’t intend to activate a park on this Monday before New Years Eve. I woke up around noon and noticed that the temperature was 15C/60F. I immediately thought, “I need to get myself to a park!”. I took a look through my POTA TODO.org file to see what is the next closest park that I haven’t activated. There are two WMAs that are a bit of a challenge to get to. US-7777 is…
Links to content, software, and resources that I enjoy. They are provided in alphabetically order and not by preference. # Content Dave Casler Ask Dave! Informative videos on ham radio concepts Michael KB9VBR , Honest reviews and POTA content Thomas K4SWL First person QRP operations # Software Cloudlog A self-hosted logging platform. I used this as my log archive Dahdidahdit Open-source Android CW…
Today, as part of my attempt to activate every park in Maryland, I visited two historic locations. This was my first twofer as an activator, so this is a long update. What a nice day to be in a park. The sun was shining, and the temps were high. # US-0808 Clara Barton National Historic Site The first park I activated was US-0808 , the home of the “Angel of the Battlefield” Clara…
My kid and I went out to activate US-1589 Patuxent River State Park . There were two locations that I scouted for activation. One was the Patuxent River Nature Center (39.23929884210381, -77.05864241903075). The other is a location at the end of a long dirt road called Brown Church Rd (39.318858564773144, -77.1775463352946). I took the elevations of both locations. The Brown Church Rd location was…
I recently watched Michael KB9VBR’s YouTube video on using a Faraday cloth as a radial network. He has been using a window screen for this purpose, but found that a Faraday cloth has the same performance with less weight. I was almost about to click “Buy It Now” on the Faraday cloth when I had a thought, “Would a Mylar blanket work the same way as the Faraday cloth or…
In my previous post I showed how to get notifications from HamAlert on a deGoogled phone. That solution requires setting up Node Red to template HamAlert spots and forward them the ntfy. After I wrote that post, I noticed that ntfy had support to template JSON posted to it. This means that anyone with access to a ntfy server can receive HamAlert spots on their deGoogled phone without needing to…
This blog has been a bit neglected the past few months because I fell down an amateur radio rabbit hole. I got my technician license in March, my General in April, and I’m taking my Extra test at the end of June. You can follow all my ham radio adventures on Mastodon.radio . My ham radio related code can be found on my ham radio GitLab repository A big aspect of amateur radio is contacting…