One cool thing about having an amateur radio blog is that you get e-mail from people who read your blog. Lately, I’ve gotten e-mail from hams who have blogs of their own. Below, find links to and mini-reviews of these blogs.
The first is the blog of my friend, Ramakrishnan, VU3RDD. I met Ramakrishnan via my blog, and we’ve been swapping e-mail for the past year or so. I’ve blogged about Ramakrishnan’s efforts to get licensed, and now he has a blog of his own. Ramakrishnan’s blog is somewhat like mine, a diary of his activities. He’s a DSP engineer with Texas Instruments in India, so many of his entries are technical in nature.
For example, the entry for April 12 talks about using the TI MPS430 process or amateur radio applications. This was interesting to me as most amateur radio microcontroller applications are now being built around the PIC family of chips. As Ramakrishnan points out, however, the MPS430 may be more appropriate for amateur radio applications. Of course, it is a TI chip, and he may be a bit biased in that direction :), but it does have a lot of features that might make it more useful for hams, such as high-performance analog functions.
The second is bytes and hertz, a creation of Zane, K2DYB. It’s a bit more news-oriented than mine is, and perhaps has a more local focus (Zane lives in western NY), but still an interesting read. I liked the article on the Indian amateur radio satellite. I hadn’t seen that anywhere else. It also has a cool little “Ham Chatterbox” in the righthand column. I think I’m going to add one of these to my blog, but call it “QRM.”
Finally, we have the Alaska Ham Radio Reference. I picked up this link from bytes and hertz. AHRR is a production of KL0RN, and, as he points out in his first post, is dedicated to the “activities and operating modes of hams in the interior of Alaska.” This blog was only recently started, but already has a couple of good items.
Please support these bloggers. If you live in India, western New York, or Alaska, read these blogs and send them items of interest that you think they might want to write about. These ideas will help the blog grow and prosper.
If this keeps up, we may have to start a network for ham radio bloggers. But, where would we have it–20m or Echolink?
Dan KB6NU says
Roy, KL7GQ writes:
If you’re desparate to read an Alaska Ham Blog, try my site at http://www.kl7gq.com and leave me a guest book entry if you please. It’s still new, but I write about stuff I build or put together. The one I’m hopeing will be most useful is the VXR-7000 repeater programming, as everyone seems to have trouble with that. Not much stuff there yet, but I’m threatening to get un-lazy and write up some new stuff (like that stupid weather receiver).
I remember when I was a kid listening to hams. My receiver was AM only, so to hear the SSB I had to take a small transistor radio and tune it till the L.O. hit the freq I was listening to; then with some finess I could get it just right to hear the SSB.
Now days, the arthritis keeps me from fixing my broken antenna, and the radio is silent. So I guess I’ll just have to work on http://www.kl7gq.com till I get it fixed. I try to write useful ‘how to’ stuff, but it always comes up sounding like a blog… so go read it!
73’s KL7GQ, Valdez, Alaska