Field Day is an annual Emergency Prep exercise carried out the 4th full weekend of June from 1800 GMT time Saturday to either Noon or 3PM Sunday. In our Central Time zone it’s 1PM to 1PM. The very first thing you need in an emergency (radio wise) is a source of electricity, and the cheapest…

Tom WA5MAZ (ex KJ5NMH) is making sure his old Motorolas are up to spec, and bot this Gertsch FM deviation meter in Muskogee for 75 bucks. It’s old, full of tubes, and needs to be at a particular temp to be in spec, so comes with A Mercury Thermometer that contains Hg. It’s a normal…

Last year at Green Country, I thought there were a lot of books, old Radio Amateur’s Handbooks and Callbooks etc. This year I noticed quite a few Kenwood 520 HF rigs (plain 5 band 520, the 6 b 520S, and economy model 520SE without 12V capability and lacking plugs for the 10 Watt 6M or…

Tom WA5MAZ (ex KJ5NMH) brought in some old Motorola stuff again, a tube type portable 2M rig from back before you were born. He made this 90V power supply to test the tiny jelly bean size tubes to find (surprisingly) they all worked. Listen on 146.91 Wed and Friday at 7 to hear the old…

Tom NMH has switched back to his old callsign, WA5MAZ from the mid 1960s. At the Thurs 03.26 meeting he brought in two (2) Motorola handy t – well, back then they were more like lunch boxes, the one from 1958 mostly transistors (except driver and final tubes – little ones, 1W out), and the…

We were going to compare RX sensitivity on Chinese H/Ts, but instead, we spent most of the hour measuring TX output and using a Spectrum Analyzer (Tiny SA on Ebay for $68) to check for spurious output. Shown above is an anomaly, second, third, and fourth harmonics that weren’t there. Two Baofeng UV5Rs (the x3…

Entering the outbuilding behind the house you were greeted with an enormous Ham collection of a lifetime, and atop shelves on the far wall, dozens of 2M cavities (those round things on the top). Motorola experts would know if those stacks of radios were Maxars or Mocoms, but all the rest of us could do…

Both Mike KI5YX and Phillip KI5PFV brought their new Baofeng DMR HTs, the new DM32 model with lots of memories and larger size. In the Amateurish (see what I did there?) pic below, Mike’s 55 dollar black and green HT is on the right. Phillip spent $67 to get the clear plastic see through model…

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…