Jeep Mobile

Posted on December 29, 2015 by n4tqu

IMG_0002Back in February 2015 I traded in my Ford F-150 for a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited. Being a Ham of course I had to take out my existing mobile setup prior to trading in the truck and then installation into a new environment is always its own set of challenges.

It has taken me several months to get a working setup. The main issue being that the Kenwood D710 head unit is kind of a pain to mount in a stable, convenient, yet out of the way location. And since I also do mobile APRS I need the GPS unit in a location where it can get a good view of the sky.

Continue reading →

Posted in Ham Radio, Mobile | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Jeep Mobile

13 Colonies A Clean Sweep

Posted on August 28, 2015 by n4tqu

13-Colonies-2015-medThis year I had the opportunity to participate in the 13 Colonies event as I was on vacation while the house was being painted. It was a fun event, especially as I had a plans to be out of town on the weekend so I had a somewhat limited time window to work on getting a clean sweep. I did manage it and got to use the 40m band a bit which I don’t normally do. I did manage to get one of the bonus stations as well which was nice.

Continue reading →

Posted in Ham Radio | Tagged , , | Comments Off on 13 Colonies A Clean Sweep

Navassa QSL Card Arrived!

Posted on May 21, 2015 by n4tqu

I made a good effort to work the 2015 Navassa DXpedition while they were on the air. Hard to pass up such a good opportunity to get a rare DX on my way to getting my DXCC awards. I was able to work them on 3 bands (10/15/20) all on phone and using nothing but wire antennas.

Dad and I had built and somewhat tuned a 15/17m fan dipole at Christmas but I never got it put up properly. After trying to work K1N on a non-resonant antenna and failing, I went out and quickly hung the fan dipole in a tree about 20′ off the ground and had my 15m contact shortly thereafter. Couldn’t get any better than that.

The time came to order my QSL card using their OQRS system and the process could not have been much easier. All my contacts were in the logs, a quick order and checkout and everything was done. The confirmations in LoTW showed up quite a bit sooner than my paper card, but I got them all with no problems. Thanks Guys!

Below is my QSL card:

 

 

Posted in Ham Radio | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Navassa QSL Card Arrived!

Dayton Hamvention 2015

Posted on May 21, 2015 by n4tqu

Dad and I made the trip to the Dayton Hamvention this year, the first time for both of us. It was a good trip and flying from Atlanta to Dayton is pretty quick. But that also means you can’t easily purchase as much stuff as you have to get it on the plane back with you.

Continue reading →

Posted in Ham Radio | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Dayton Hamvention 2015

Site updated

Posted on March 26, 2015 by n4tqu

While I like the concept of the Mynt static generator and using static files to serve this website from Amazon, the actual maintaining and updating of the content though is another matter. So, I have made the desicion to migrate the site over to WordPress. Managing content with a CMS makes this a lot easier, and hopefully means that I will make more frequent updates to the site in general.

Posted in Site News | Leave a comment