5 March 07
Plans for a Yakkety-Yak?
Temple Grandin’s talk a couple of weeks ago referred to people like me as Yakkety-yaks: we can’t stop talking. Now it seems I have a new way to do just that.
It’s not like I needed another hobby, folks. After some months of sparse activity, our warm weather has brought all kinds of action into the garden, and I will need to get working hard to transition from winter to summer with a minor spring garden in between, quite apart from planting ceanothus while blocking weeds in the space under the plum and nectarine trees. I’ve been working on more quince drawings. Let’s not even get started on what I need to be doing at work…
And yet, there’s something so appealing about the idea of volunteering a skill not held by many for the cause of supporting a long bike ride or endurance horse race: not to mention being of service in an emergency. Ham radio is not something I ever dreamed of getting into. It’s very male, for one thing (I was the only woman at my class on Saturday and at the exam, which more than doubled the number of people in the room). But I can yak it up with the best of them, and I just might…
4 March 07
Day Of Accomplishments
Yesterday we were busy — I helped break a world record and Pica passed her ham radio licensing exam! The world record was for the longest bicycle parade. The previous record was 614 bikes; we ended up with 913 bikes in the parade. The parade was organized by the UC Davis undergrads on the occasion of the final home basketball game of the season. It started off at the track and old football stadium on the east edge campus and wended its way a couple of miles through campus to end up at the basketball pavilion. It took us about a half-hour to get us out of the track leaving single file, and we moseyed along at maybe 7 miles per hour. The mayor of Davis officiated at both the start and finish, and there were cheerleaders en route.
Meanwhile, Pica was taking a one-day ham radio class sponsored by the Yolo Amateur Radio Society with a licensing test at the very end of the day. The class consisted of a grueling series of videos, and the exam was 35 questions multiple-choice. She passed, and in a week or so will receive her official call sign from the FCC!
23 February 07
The Joy Of Destroying One's Shopping
Yesterday I heard Richard Stallman speak on copyright and community. He started off by talking about the four freedoms that software should have to be considered truly free: the freedom to run the software, the freedom to modify the software for one’s own needs, the freedom to redistribute copies so one can help one’s neighbor, and the freedom to improve the program, and release the improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. Of these, he noted, only the first two apply to physical objects rather than software.
It’s fun to buy something with the intention of destructively modifying it right away. I’m trying to build up a computer soundcard interface for my transceiver out of bits and bobs you can find at Radio Shack and OfficeMax. Today’s foray was to OfficeMax to pick a keyboard/mouse extension cable of which I promptly cut off one end. I just need the 6-pin connector at one end and bare wires at the other. No luck so far in getting the interface to work — I’m still getting the same RF noise back into the receiver as when I did when I wired it straight using a mono audio cable with 1/8” plugs. But that’s tinkering for you.
12 February 07
Evening Pile-up
Tune around the ham bands and sometimes you will hear dozens of chirpings slightly out-of-tune from one another, some loud, some barely audible, sounding all the world like a large flock of colonial seabirds trying to attract a mate. In fact, they are trying to get the attention of a ham operator who has gone to some forlorn corner of the world and is transmitting from there. (Like birders, many ham operators are listers — what they list are the geographic entities they have made contact with.)
I heard such a colonial din this evening low on the 80 meter band. I looked up online what was attracting their attention. Appropriately enough, they were trying to contact an expedition in the Caribbean to Aves Island.
1 February 07
First Morse Code Contact
It was hardly to New Zealand or some other far-off place, but we have to start somewhere. Yesterday evening I set up the radio and antenna on the 40 meter band and began my routine. The two simplest ways to make a contact are tune around and listen for somebody calling CQ — that is, announcing to the world you’re seeking a contact — and reply to them, or to call CQ yourself and hope somebody replies to your own call. I had been doing a good mix of both when I put out yet another “CQ CQ CQ DE KG6KDJ KG6KDJ K”. And I’m gobsmacked when somebody comes back — loud. I don’t quite catch his call sign but reply in kind, very nervously and with lots of mistakes. He slows way down to accommodate me. The first thing I say to him is that he’s my first HF (high-frequency bands) contact, before getting to the basics of name, location, and signal report.
His location turns out to be Davis also, about three miles from here. We get into a good long ‘rag chew’, at the raging pace of about 5 words per minute. He is incredibly patient with me, despite my keying going to pot due to nerves. I definitely did better with my listening than sending. After an hour or so we say our goodbyes — 73s in ham lingo — and I go off the air. The experience was fun and nerve-wracking at the same time. And it gets easier from this point on.
24 January 07
Aural Calligraphy
In my two tries so far I haven’t made a Morse Code contact yet. One thing that I’m sure will help is practicing my sending — my calls out now probably sound like complete mush. I have a practice key which sounds a tone when I press the key. What I do is hook it up to the computer and record it using a sound editing program. (I use Audacity which is free and open source.) The program is nice to use here because not only can I replay my sending I can also visually look at the letterforms. It becomes quite clear when I am for instance holding the final “dih” too long in the letter C (dah-dih-dah-dih). More than anything the process feels like learning to do calligraphy in sound, in time.
Above is a sketch of my practice key. I have been doing many of these brush pen sketches lately using Pica’s walnut ink.
19 January 07
KG6KDJ/AG
I passed my test, both the multiple-choice bit and the Morse Code section! So I’m now licensed to transmit on the high-frequency bands. The /AG appended to my call sign above is what I have to use until my paperwork about the license upgrade goes through the FCC.
The word is that Morse Code testing will end on February 23, so I’m sneaking in under the wire to complete the code test.
Tomorrow is figuring to be a good day to play radio. Let’s see how I do on the new wavelengths!
16 January 07
Test Approaching
I’m planning to take the exam for my General Class amateur radio license this Friday at a session in Lafayette. The imminent elimination of the Morse Code requirement has gotten me motivated to take the test while the requirement for the Morse Code is still in effect. I will be having to copy code at the rate of 5 words per minute for the test, in addition to the multiple-choice questions on radio theory and practice. 5 WPM is still very slow, but it’s a good starting-off point for on-the-air adventures in Morse.
28 December 06
Difficult Connection
My efforts at receiving digital keyboarding modes such as PSK31 have hit a technical snag in that far too much noise from the computer is propagating back into the receiver along the audio cable that I use to connect the two. Yesterday I picked up a snap-on ferrite choke from Radio Shack to try to alleviate the noise problem, but that didn’t help, so I returned it. The next step is to try putting in a 1:1 isolation transformer into the cable somewhere between the computer and the radio, but a) generally useless Radio Shack didn’t seem to have that part in the store today though it shows up on their website and b) I would actually have to do some real wiring — scary! So I’m stymied.
23 December 06
Weather Faxes
I realize I can download practically any weather chart I might dream of from the National Weather Service websites, but somehow it’s just neat to pull the weather fax transmissions for mariners over shortwave and look at those. The transmissions I was picking up originate from a station at Point Reyes and cover the North Pacific. Admittedly, I’m glad I didn’t need to actually read these faxes for nautical purposes: there was too much noise in the transmission for them to be legible. But I’m working on that.