Mike KI5YX brought in a 220 J-Pole made with 3/8 in copper pipe (2/3 the length of a 2M J-Pole). The ‘U’ at the bottom was about 13 in tall, and the half wave radiator above was around 26 inches. There used to be a 220 Net on one of the 220 repeaters, but not…

Mike KI5YX: Really? That old? Tom KJ5NMH: Yeah, we weren’t even teenagers yet when this one was new. 1958. Tube finals, a 6146 driver and 6550 final, both laid down horizontal in the aluminum heat sink in back. International doesn’t make crystals any more so I added a freq synthsizer, you can see it under…

Right as you went in the door at the Henryetta Hamfest Saturday, Jason W5HP had this nice looking Yaesu 950 HF and 6M rig for which he was asking $500, not much more than a new Xiegu G90 that doesn’t have even a quarter as many buttons and knobs and runs only 20W. Some other…

Larry W5LQF answered the most Jeopardy game questions Thursday night and took home a 1995 Radio Amateur’s Handbook prize. Sam KJ5BJR came in 2nd and won the 1972 edition (which has a bunch of Vacuum Tube specs in the appendix). Questions (or answers) included What’s the ARL callsign, W1AW, and What’s the color code for…

Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Ohm are in a car. They get pulled over. Heisenberg is driving and the cop asks him, “Do you know how fast you were going?” “No, but I know exactly where I am” Heisenberg replies. The cop says, “You were doing 55 in a 35.” Heisenberg throws up his hands and shouts,…

Earl WB5UUW from Broken Arrow, brought in this key component of an All Band Rotary Spark morse code transmitter from the WWI era, a motor driven spark gap. Together with a huge power supply (takes 2 men and a boy to lift), CW key, and aerial wires connected to the two spark posts shown, it’ll…

It takes about 35 Ah of battery power to run a hundred Watt rig for 24 hrs at Field Day. That’s most of the ‘usable’ capacity (50%) of a 100 Ah lead acid battery, but only 35 of those new hundred Ah LifePo batteries, and you can buy those used on EBay for just over…

A hundred years ago most Hams had transitioned from Spark transmitters to the new Vacuum Tubes which, through Feedback, were able to generate just a single frequency output thus allowing more than one guy at a time to transmit without having to decipher the slightly different tonal quality of a spark to determine who it…

According to some, QST magazine used to use the abbreviation MC for Morse Code until one day the kid they had in the print room dropped one of the page blocks, spilling most of the type on the floor. He got it all back together, but wasn’t a Ham at the time and put those…

Mark KJ5JVV brought his five hundred dollar Fluke model 177 meter and verified our previous readings on a 100 Ah LifePo made with our seven dollar Harbor Freight digital meters, having found our place between the arches in the center of town and the Bixby Police antenna (see pic above) and then went across the…