As part of my RFI hunting adventure I am working to make sure that my station is setup properly. I’ve built a new ham desk that should help me cleanly route all the various cables between radios, power supplies, PC control and coax. As part of that work I have just installed a ground rod right outside the coax entry point to the house.
Since I upgraded to General I have been experiencing near constant S8 level noise on the 40m band. I’ve also had S5 +/- level nois on 20m. So far I’ve determined that the Samsung refrigerator in the kitchen is a bad RFI source, as well as the usb to serial adapter going from my shack PC to my Kenwood TM-D710A TNC which I use for the APRS iGate.
Yesterday (Aug. 9th) I passed the Amateur Radio Element 3 written examination to obtain my General class license. This probably took a lot longer than it should have, seeing as I’ve been licensed for over 25 years.
For my study guide I used the “General Class Study Manual” from Gordon West/W5YI. I also used a combination of Youtube and Google to help me answer some of the more theoretical quesions, forumlas, etc. My Elmer (see below) happens to be my father and that certainly helped a great deal. For practice tests I used the test sites at AA9PW, eham.net and qrz.com. I really appreciate the way that the QRZ test exam shows you immediate feedback whether you answered correctly or not.
Hello and welcome to the latest incarnation of my ham radio hobby webiste. n4tqu.com is being built using the Mynt static website generator and uses Bootstrap for the (simplistic) layout and look.
This website will be somewhat of an ongoing experiement as I learn how to use some of the newer modern web tools.
73,
n4tqu
