The Citrus Belt Amateur Radio Club in San Bernardino, CA organizes an annual Route 66 On The Air Special Event. This year's event started on Sep 6 and runs through Sep 14. A bunch of clubs are operating stations along the route, from Santa Monica to Chicago, using special event call signs. There are several mobile operators, including one in a small plan who will be flying over the route. The club website has all the details, including lists of participating clubs and cities, schedules, frequencies, a log sheet, and the criteria and procedure to request a certificate or decal for participation in the event.

Zero Retries is an independent newsletter promoting technological innovation in and adjacent to Amateur Radio. Published by Steve and Tina Stroh, it's the weekly newsletter to read if you are what Steve calls a NewTechHam. NewTechHams wanna build handheld SDRs that can do DSTAR, AllStar, or any other digital mode with just a software update. NewTechHams are as comfortable with a Raspberry Pi as they are with a 2m HT. NewTechHams want to design repeaters that use digital timeslicing so a repeater doesn't need a big duplexer or multiple frequencies. If any of this sounds interesting to you, you should be subscribed to this free email newsletter.

Surrey Amateur Radio Communications, in Surrey, B.C., Canada, publishes a bi-monthly (that's every other month, not twice per month) periodical which I just discovered. It's free, and it's outstanding. Get new issues at https://ve7sar.blogspot.com/.

I have a KSC-25LS charging cradle for my Kenwood TH-D75 handheld. This charging cradle comes with an AC/DC power supply which provides 12V to the cradle. I wanted the option to power the charging cradle directly from any 12V DC power source connected via Powerpoles.

Antenna design is a game of tradeoffs. There is no such thing as an inexpensive, portable, lightweight, small, all band, high gain, omnidirectional antenna. The good news is that for any given use case, there is probably an antenna design that works pretty well. The antennas that come with most handhelds are inexpensive, small, and portable, but have terrible performance. Their low gain is especially worrisome on a handheld which typically has only 5W of power. I found an antenna that's portable, small, with 7dB of gain, and it's great for use on handhelds: Ed Fong's DBJ-2.

I pre-ordered a Kenwood TH-D75 as soon as the distributors started taking pre-orders. I've had my Kenwood TH-D75 for a week now, and have had a chance to use if for quite a few hours. This is an expensive radio, I paid $750 for mine. Why would anyone pay this much money for any handheld radio? And is this one worth the money? You can buy a Baofeng UV-5R for less than $20, and it includes a charging cradle, which the Kenwood does not. The Baofeng will transmit and receive on the 2m and 70cm amateur radio bands, receive nearly anything with FM modulation, and with a little tweaking, can transmit on GMRS and MURS frequencies. What could the TH-D75 have that makes it worth almost 40 times the price?

For the last couple of months, I've been working to gather data on all the repeaters in the Intermountain Intertie. I wanted to make a nicer looking presentation of this linked repeater system than the other ones that I've seen. I also wanted to add some other useful artifacts like a Google Map showing the locations and links of all the repeaters, and a CSV file that you can download into CHIRP and then program into your radio. I also want this data to always be current and up to date.

Today I added three new Arizona repeaters to my Intermountain Intertie page. Thanks to the Arizona Repeater Association for their work to link these repeaters to the Intertie. Large portions of Northern and Central Arizona, including the Phoenix metropolitan area now are covered by repeaters linked to the Intertie.

There is more work to be done: each repeater will eventually have it's own page with pictures, a description, and history of that repeater site.

I got tired of updating WordPress, so I built a new static website using Jekyll. I think it looks better than the old one, it's faster, and I dumped Google Analytics so there is no tracking or cookies. Even the fonts are served locally.

Maybe this will inspire me to write here more often.

Once I decided to buy a radio, there are a million choices out there. I had no idea what exactly I was looking for, or what I would use, or how fast I would outgrow it and want something better. I knew I wanted a handheld, and that's about it. Many people suggest that you should buy a cheap Baofeng as your first radio. That way you can expand your skills and learn what you really want and like before spending a lot of money. I ignored that advice. I figure that I'll always want a handheld, so I might as well just get a good one.

After lots of research and looking carefully at many options I chose the Kenwood TH-D72A. It's a 5W dual bander with built in GPS and APRS, and it's splash proof and dust proof.

I immediately replaced the included rubber duck with a Diamond SRH320A triband antenna. This change made a marked improvement in both transmit and receive performance. If you were wondering if replacing the rubber duck antenna on your handheld is worth it, stop wondering and just buy a better antenna. Money well spent.

This antenna feels like if you bent it too much, it would permanently deform, or even worse, break. However, it has proved to be much sturdier than I expected. It's been thrown in backpacks with other stuff, tossed in duffle bags with clothes, and bent every which way, with no ill effects. With the stock rubber duck antenna, the radio is 11" tall. With the SRH320A, it's about 18.5" tall.

I have been very happy with this radio and antenna combo. Highly recommended.

When my dad was a kid, he built a ham radio from a kit, and strung up an antenna to the telephone pole in front of his house. The screw eye he put into the telephone pole is still there. After starting college, he sold his kit radio so he could buy shoes.

While finishing his degree in mathematics, my dad purchased one of the first electronic calculators, a HP-45.

It cost $399 in the early 1970's, which is about $1,800 today. It could do arithmetic, which was nice, but the real draw was that it could do trigonometry and logarithmic functions. This made it much faster and more powerful than the slide rule it replaced. After graduating, he spent the first half of his career as a computer programmer, or what today we would call a software engineer.

Father also liked to tinker with stuff. I remember making a killer rubber band rifle using a jig saw, a few clothes pins, and some surgical tubing. It was stout enough to break plastic toys, and left a big welt on my brother's leg when I shot him with it. My dad gave me an electronics kit, which had various components soldered on to a big breadboard, with little spring posts attached to each component. An enterprising youth could use the fistful of colored wires to create any of the two hundred projects in the included booklet. A little experimentation led to many other projects, including a doorbell/alarm for our bedroom, various kinds of sound generators, and a light activated digital counter.

My dad showed me how to use the transformer from my electric train set to make an incredibly strong electromagnet. Using the same transformer to apply current to a glass of water (which seemed incredibly dangerous to me), we created hydrogen and oxygen gasses via electrolysis. He helped me build a battery powered robot that looked like a turtle with wheels. It could roll around the floor, and would stop and turn when it ran into things. I named him Bert.

Back then, it cost real money, or a long time, to talk to people far away. Long distance phone calls were reserved for Mother's Day and were never long. A cousin my age, whose dad was a dentist in the Air Force, always seemed to live far away. For a while they were stationed in the Netherlands. We occasionally exchanged letters with drawings of our latest spaceships, but it was hard for me to get excited about and stay focused on anything with a several month cycle time.

We frequently tuned in to broadcast FM and AM stations, for music, news, and college football games. In fact, I had constructed my own AM radio using the electronics kit, but tuning it required a delicate hand. At some point we got a shortwave receiver. It seemed to have some sort of magic not found in broadcast radio. Using only the metal telescoping antenna that came in the box, we occasionally managed to hear far away conversations in languages we couldn't understand. We found a Morse Code chart in the Encyclopedia Britannica on the living room bookshelf, and tried to decipher the sing song tones we heard over the airwaves, but it was always beyond our skill. I pored over the previously uninteresting section of the HeathKit catalog (yes, someone has an old HealthKit catalog online) which contained shortwave transceivers, and dreamed of converting the closet under the stairs into my own ham shack. My interest soon waned, and I moved on to the next fascination.

I now have children of my own, and a modern tinker's workbench consists of a computer, Minecraft, a quad copter drone, and a 3D printer instead of resistors and a soldering iron. The Internet makes communication with people on the other side of the planet commonplace and instantaneous. Podcasts and Spotify have replaced broadcast radio for the rising generation. But my father still listens to NPR on an old shortwave radio, and I still find magic in amateur radio.

I finally decided to get a license. To my delight, the Morse Code proficiency requirements had been removed. After few days of studying and a couple of online practice tests and I headed off to take the Technician exam. The week I had to wait between passing the exam and receiving my call sign seemed like forever.

Now we have a different word for tinkerers; we call them makers. Whatever you call it, I love to play around with stuff. Amateur radio is an integral part of that tinkering for me.