KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

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ICQPodcast Episode 481: Home Brewing & Kit Building

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ICQ Podcast logo.In this episode, I join Martin Butler M1MRB, Caryn Eve Murray KD2GUT, Edmund Spicer M0MNG and Colin Butler M6BOY to discuss the latest amateur/ham radio news, including:

Colin, M6BOY also reports on the following:

The episode’s feature is Home brewing / Kit building.

Amateur radio in the news: MFJ sells HyGain and Cushcraft, Pitt students track Artemis, amateur radio in Bangladesh

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ITU Corporation Re-purposes Linton Armory Facility to House Iconic Amateur Radio Manufacturing

In a major expansion of its Indiana footprint, ITU Corporation has purchased the former Linton National Guard Armory to serve as the new manufacturing hub for Hy-gain and Cushcraft. Martin F. Jue, President and founder of MFJ Enterprises, Inc., is pleased to announce the sale of the renowned Hy-gain and Cushcraft antenna, rotator, and communication product lines to ITU Corporation, a 25 year old Indiana engineering and manufacturing company.

“I am thrilled to pass the torch of these legendary antenna brands to Dave & Kambi Carpenter and their team at ITU Corporation,” said Martin F. Jue, President of MFJ Enterprises.

“After nurturing these brands for decades it was vital to me that hy-gain and Cushcraft – – premier brands that have served radio operators and stations worldwide for generations – – landed in the hands of someone who understands their legacy.”

…read more

Pitt students track Artemis II spacecraft in worldwide NASA test

Pitt students track the Artemis II Orion spacecraft in real time from the rooftop of Benedum Hall. (Courtesy of the University of Pittsburgh)

A 4 a.m. test Thursday put University of Pittsburgh engineering students and the school’s ham radio club on a global stage.Pitt was one of eight educational institutions worldwide selected by NASA to study the Artemis II mission and track the Orion spacecraft.

“The big win is the student experience, and to be able to have university students take all these theoretical things we taught them in the classroom and track the spacecraft,” said Samuel Dickerson, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Pitt. “The students had to do all of it, to carry out this kind of task.”

…read more

Talking to the world from a rooftop in Dhaka: The story of Bangladesh’s amateur radio community

The room looks rather unassuming from outside. On the first floor of a residential building in Mohammadpur, Dhaka, it is cluttered in the way only a certain kind of person’s room becomes cluttered — purposefully, lovingly.

Shelves sag under transceivers, coils of cable, and half-assembled circuit boards. A fluffy orange cat surveys the chaos from a workbench by the window. On a nearby laptop screen is a dense circuit schematic.

This is the home station of Fazley Rabby — callsign S21RC — and it is, in the most literal sense, a window to the world.

…read more

New documentary on Martin F. Jue and his company, MFJ, in the works

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I found this post on reddit yesterday, and I loved the idea so much that I have volunteered to be the unofficial PR guy for this project. Say what you will about MFJ projects—and I have sometimes been critical myself about them—Martin and his company have played a big part in amateur radio for a long time. This is a story that should be told. 

With the permission of the OP, Preston Booth, I’m republishing his post here. At the bottom of the post, you’ll find a link to the documentary producer’s website, where you can make a donation to the project. I made a small donation yesterday.

—Dan

Quick Intro: My name is Preston Booth and I am a documentary filmmaker in Starkville, MS (birthplace and home of MFJ Enterprises). In 2024, Martin F. Jue’s daughter contacted me to commission a local artist to come and do a small portrait documentary to celebrate Martin’s 82nd Birthday. Once I got to meet Martin and the team, I realized that their story really deserved a feature-length production to best tell their story, and I’ve been moonlighting this project in my free time ever since. I’ve reached out to the /r/amateurradio mods about this post before making it, as I know that self-promo is frowned upon, but I think I’d regret it if I didn’t share this project with hams.

Man smiling in hallway.
Martin’s Wall of Fame.

Martin is actually a tremendously fun person to be around. Shortly after sitting for the documentary and doing his interview, he just wanted to stick around and chat about me and my life and what had led me to this point. Next thing I know he was asking me if I wanted to get dinner at some point in the future to chat more about it. It seems like he really loves to get to know people and learn about what makes them tick. From all of the research I’ve done during this project, I’ve seen him do the same for many other hams who came to tour the facility. This always sort of struck me as odd because I’m sure his workload was unfathomably taxing at his age, but it seemed like he was always willing to drop what he was doing and spend time with folks who made the trip.

Family photo.
Martin’s family. Can you guess which one is Martin?

Martin’s childhood explains a lot about MFJ’s philosophy. Martin lost his father at the age of 5 and he grew up in the back of a grocery store with as many as 11 kids at one time (siblings and nieces and nephews). He fell in love with radio tech at a young age, but due to their circumstances he had to build everything from scrap parts he got from a repairman (first ham contact) in his town. Martin grew up completely cut off from commercial ham products as a child and I think it made him hellbent on providing for others what he went without as a child. Randy Romero, Martin’s righthand at MFJ disclosed to me that Martin’s Philosophy was, “making quality affordable” and it really tracks with my interactions and research with Martin. On the topic of quality, another of Martin’s priorities was providing opportunities to folks in the local community. For those who don’t know, the deep south can be an absolutely unforgiving environment to live economically speaking. Martin’s own experience made providing opportunities for folks to prove themselves through hard work a priority for him. Realistically speaking, at any point in MFJ’s 50 plus year history he could have just outsourced manufacturing overseas and dramatically decreased his overhead and increased the quality control standards but for him it seemed to be paramount that he provide jobs locally. I know MFJ’s build quality is a passionate topic around here, and I’m not here to argue that. I just thought the backstory behind the philosophy might be interesting to some of you.

Newspaper clipping.
Newspaper clipping explaining Martin’s science project.

Martin’s first big break with technology actually came from a science fair project in the tenth grade. At the age of 14 he built a full radio telemetry station from what others may have considered garbage. The technicals are really fascinating so I will include the quote here:

“… This was back in 1960’s when satellites were first put into orbit. And my project was a telemetry system that would demonstrate how a satellite would work.

It would do things in a very simple manner:  to measure humidity, I had two nails and it had salt around it, and I would measure the resistance of that. Because that salt would absorb moisture and reduce the resistance.

 And the way that I measured the resistance was I built an audio oscillator whose frequency would change with resistance. And the same thing with measuring wind direction and wind velocity. They used volume controls out of the radios and it would just turn and swivel and they would change the resistance. And a transistor with the cap taken off would measure the intensity of light.

 But each one of those would cause the frequency of the oscillator to change; so you’d hear a change in pitch. And then there was an electric motor that I got off of a display that was on one of the displays from a store, a tiny little motor that would turn a switch and it would switch each one of these for a certain amount of time.

Then I built a little radio transmitter on a broadcast band that would transmit it to a different receiver, just an ordinary receiver. And then from the tone that you could match by using another oscillator, it would be calibrated. You could make measurements.”

He won his school’s fair, but it also ended up being the first science fair project the school had entered at the state level and he won that one as well. The grand prize was a trip to Mobile Alabama to ride on a Destroyer and it was actually the very first time he had ever left the state of Mississippi in his life. Of course, I’m blown away by his resourcefulness but it’s also really cool to see the defining moment where you can see the wheels turning in his mind that a mastery of technology could really start providing opportunities to better his and his families situation.

College graduate with mother.
Martin graduates from Georgia Tech.

Martin’s first move after receiving his master’s degree at Georgia Tech wasn’t to establish MFJ, it was to move home and run the family grocery store business for his brother so his brother could take time off and travel to mainland China.  To hear Martin tell it, he says this is where he got his “MGS: Master’s in Grocery Store”. From his own words, this is where he learned the fundamentals of business, marketing, and client relations. This one just blows me away because he was so hilariously over qualified to be running a little country grocery store but his priority has always been family and duty.

Drawing of a grocery store.
Jue Family Grocery, drawn from memory by Martin’s nephew.

Martin was drafted for the Vietnam War. This isn’t something he ever discussed with me or with the broader public, but I found an excerpt from an old ECHO Zoom QA he did a while back. Apparently shortly after high school he received his draft letter, went through bootcamp and was in his own words, “happy to serve” but at the end of the process they told him, “You can’t see, and you can’t hear, and we don’t want you.” Just sort of nuts to think about the butterfly effect of Martin going overseas instead of college on all of our lives.

I get the feeling that Martin is deeply a private person, but he is so generous with his time and experience that he says yes to nearly every one who asks that he often finds himself in the spotlight. As a result, he’s often asked a lot of similar questions regarding his upbringing and his early experiences with HAM tech. One thing I find really interesting is that when discussing the first project he ever worked on (the fox hole crystal radio he built from the boy scout handbook) he always is sure to mention that he could not ever get it to work, but that the time he spent trying to make it work is what got him excited about ham tech. He later built a single transistor radio from a kit he saved up to purchase, but when asked about his first project he always is sure to mention the failure. He doesn’t seem to measure his experiences by his successes but what he was able to take from each experience.

Man holding a radio.
Martin and the first radio he ever built.

Quick Factoid section:

  • MFJ’s longest tenured employee was a woman named Phyliss Randle who worked for 45 years at the company before retiring. At one point MFJ was employing three generations of her family which just blows me away. In fact, while getting to know the employees I didn’t interact with anyone (not including students and recent grads) who had been there for shorter than 9 years.
  • The first Dayton Hamvention that Martin attended while he was teaching at MS State Univ. and he would drive all night Thu/Fri and Sunday after class so he didn’t have to buy a hotel room lmao. He said that he’d often be getting back to Starkville on Monday morning just in time to teach his first class. Man was an absolute beast I have no idea how he was able to operate on such little sleep.
  • On the topic of MSU, MFJ’s first production line was actually comprised of students who built the project for extra credit or personal compensation. Apparently, he didn’t stop teaching and pursue MFJ full time until they had over 30 employees, so there were many years where he was working two full time jobs.
  • I still don’t know what Martin’s middle name is. It’s sort of funny because it seems like such a non-important detail, but whenever someone else he just says, “the F stands for fun” and he’s sort of private about it. That being said I have had a lot of fun spending time with him so I can’t say it is entirely inaccurate.
  • On the subject of the name, he mentioned that he named it MFJ Enterprises because he always wanted it to grow, but that he didn’t name it Martin F Jue Enterprises, “just in case the business failed, I didn’t want to ruin the family name.”

Honestly, I could go on and on. I’m just fascinated by this man and his company and I feel so blessed to be the one to get to tell his story. If anyone is interested in the project or watching the trailer, go to  https://www.prestonboothcinematography.com/mfj-documentary.

If anyone has any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer them all in a timely manner.

I’m also really interested in hearing the community’s MFJ stories as well, so if you have anything you’d like to contribute, I’d love to hear about it.

Thank you for letting me be a part of your ham radio community!

Amateur radio in the news: MFJ, turn an Android phone into an HT, Delta County emcomm

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Starkville man ends reign as king of ham radio parts: ‘It was rough trying to say goodbye’

In 1972, Martin Jue was a young entrepreneur who decided to use his electrical engineering expertise to start a new business, MFJ Enterprises, in Starkville, his adopted hometown.

The cottage industry he cultivated grew into a global enterprise that catered to ham radio enthusiasts, which will be missed now that he has shut down manufacturing operations and is gradually unloading the remaining merchandise.

…read more

Turn your Android phone into a ham radio with this open-source project

Vance Vagell, an experienced UX professional at Google, is the brains behind the kv4p HT project. Distributed under the GPL 3.0, the kv4p HT is a homebrew VHF ham radio that can be attached to an Android smartphone via a USB-C port for turning it into a portable radio transceiver.

…read more

Delta County ham radio group ready for emergencies

ESCANABA, Mich. (WLUC) – An old form of communication is vital in hurricane recovery efforts as amateur radio operators across North Carolina and Florida connect rural areas with needed resources. A similar safety net operates across Michigan and the Upper Peninsula to keep residents safe.

Bob Petersen, a licensed amateur or ham radio operator, says his “shack in a box” can mobilize emergency radio communications in just 15 minutes. “It works great for emergency communications because I can quickly and easily go where the communication is needed,” Petersen said.

While Petersen‘s “shack” is portable, the main radio shack is in the Antique Village at the U.P. State Fairgrounds in Escanaba. That’s where Petersen and other amateur radio operators in the Delta County Amateur Radio Society coordinate communications on the state-wide emergency radio net.

…read more (and watch video)

Wow…MFJ to cease production on May 17

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There have been rumors floating around for the past couple of days that MFJ was going to discontinue production. That seemed almost impossible to me because they’ve become such a big part of amateur radio. Nonetheless, the rumors are true. Martin Jue sent out this message earlier today:

April 25, 2024

Dear Fellow Hams and Friends,

It is with a sad heart as I write this letter

As many of you have heard by now, MFJ is ceasing its on-site production in Starkville, Mississippi on May 17, 2024.  This is also the same for our sister companies’ Ameritron, Hygain, Cushcraft, Mirage and Vectronics.

Times have changed since I started this business 52 years ago.  Our product line grew and grew and prospered.  Covid changed everything in businesses including ours.  It was the hardest hit that we have ever had and we never fully recovered.

I turned 80 this year.  I had never really considered retirement but life is so short and my time with my family is so precious.

I want to thank all of our employees who have helped build this company with me over the years.  We have many employees who have made MFJ their career for 10, 20, 30, 40 and more years.

We are going to continue to sell MFJ products past May 17, 2024.  We have a lot of stock on hand. We will continue to offer repair service work for out-of-warranty and in-warranty units for the foreseeable future.

Finally, a special thanks to all of our customers and our dealers who have made MFJ a worldwide name and a profitable business for so many years.  You all are so much appreciated.

Sincerely Yours, 73s
Martin F. Jue, K5FLU

I would be surprised if someone didn’t buy the company—there was talk that DX Engineering made an offer—but at this point, it doesn’t appear that there’s a buyer. Stay tuned.

What are we doing wrong?

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buddipole_2268_809320About ten years ago, one of the guys in my General Class course, called and asked if I’d like to see his new Buddipole, and oh, by the way, could I bring over my antenna analyzer? When I got over there, he had the Buddipole mounted on a tripod, much the same way as it’s mounted in the picture at right. (Being in Michigan, however, we didn’t have an ocean view and palm trees swaying in the breeze.)

We connected up the antenna analyzer, but no matter what we did, we couldn’t get a good match on 20m. This was puzzling to me, as there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of hams out there that are very successful using Buddipoles in this configuration.

I then suggested that we try one of the Buddipole elements in the vertical position, and operate it against a full, quarter-wavelength counterpoise. I had brought some wire along for just this purpose. We cut it, connected it, and voila, we had a good match.

What brought this all back to mind was that on Monday, another friend called me and asked if I could bring over my antenna analyzer to make some measurements on a dipole that he was attempting to make using a couple of MFJ 30m ham sticks that he bought at Dayton. Although the ham stick is designed to be a vertical antenna, MFJ sells a bracket that supposedly allows you to use two of their ham sticks as a dipole, much like the Buddipole. He told me that no matter what he tried, he couldn’t seem to get the SWR down.

Before going over there, I found an item on reddit that I thought might help him. I emailed this to him, but he replied that he tried all of the suggestions, but “still no luck.”

So, last night, I went over to his house. He had disconnected one of the ham sticks,  and when I connected the analyzer to it, I got a reading between 2.5:1 and 3:1. I suggested that we try connecting a wire counterpoise to it, but he was hot on getting the dipole configuration to work, so we screwed in the other element. Whoa! The SWR jumped up  to 8.5:1.

We buzzed out the connections to make sure that there were no shorts and that one of the ham sticks was connected to the center conductor of the coax, and that the other ham stick was connected to the shield. We also moved the mast away from the house. Neither of these had any affect on the SWR.

At this point, he decided just to return the ham sticks to MFJ. Even so, it bugs me a little that we couldn’t get this to work. I’m wondering if any of you might give us a little insight as to what we’re doing wrong. It doesn’t seem like it should be so complicated, but as I’ve said before, I’m certainly not an antenna expert.