A couple of days ago, I worked a fellow who had used my study guide to get back into ham radio. Yesterday, I got this email:
Roughly five years ago my wife and I were downsizing and decided to sell our house. I was googling something about homes and for an unknown reason, a link was presented to me about a Technician Class PDF study guide. I hadn’t had my license for twenty years and had no interest in ham radio until I looked at the study guide, your study guide.
At that time, I had recently lost my father to brain cancer. His call was NZ3U and before that, he was WA3MWT. Ham radio was a huge part of his life and mine as a youngster. I guess I was feeling nostalgic at the time and also feeling guilty that he and I no longer shared the hobby before he passed. When I looked over the study guide, I realized I knew most of the material. So, I used your guide and decided to go for the exam. You know the rest of the story. I did it to satisfy my dad’s warning to me when I let my license lapse. He said “You’ll regret it someday” and he was right.
Shortly after I passed the exam and got my General ticket and we moved to a location in the woods. A perfect spot for wire antennas. So I threw up a home made dipole, bought a IC7200 and was up and running. The rest is history.
So in short, your study guide was solely responsible for my return to ham radio. That’s another reason it’s always a thrill to work you.
How cool is that?
SKN with the Flex
On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, I participated for a little while in Straight Key Night (SKN). Overall, I made five contacts before my wrist gave out on me. As I was making contacts, though, it occurred to me that it was somewhat amusing to be using what is arguably the most modern radio on the market with nearly the most ancient mode.
Should I tell this guy about his signal?
One of the signals that I encountered on Straight Key Night was the signal below. This is the widest signal I’ve ever seen on the Flex panadapter. As you can see, it’s nearly 4 kHz wide, while the others are more like 100 Hz wide.
My question is, should I send the guy this screenshot? I’m thinking that if I were him, I’d want to know that perhaps something is wrong with my transmitter.
Walter Underwood says
Yes, they should hear about that. Maybe they’re really running a spark gap rig, but maybe they have a problem.
Dan KB6NU says
As I recall, the guy said he was running a Collins transmitter.
Chuck K4RGN says
I don’t know the vertical scale in your screen capture. Nor do I know the calibration and dynamic range of your Flex compared to a professional spectrum analyzer. If the guy is running a kilowatt five blocks down the street, his signal is going to look fat… but his actual bandwidth at 50 dB down could be just 100 Hz. All the fat might be below an acceptable threshold. Just can’t tell. And yeah, I know someone down the street who does this to me.
Dan KB6NU says
Good point, but this guy is hundreds of miles away from me.
Chuck K4RGN says
Understood. On 20 and above, though, I’ve had almost the same thing happen with a guy in another state running a kilowatt into a high-gain antenna pointed right at me. And the ones doing that with FT8 are a real pain.