Zip on in to the 7-minute mark where the show begins
As (barely a) Hurricane Beryl approaches landfall on the Texas coast, East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ welcomes ARRL South Texas Section Emergency Coordinator Jeff Walter KE5FGA to the show to talk about Amateur Radio emcomm in his area.
It may have been the longest DAY of the year, but it was still a long NIGHT for K4AAQ
Gary edited a little home movie of this year’s Field Day operation. Then a look at some of the media from this year. Finally some thoughts on the GMRS linking controversy.
Links to the News Stories and stuff:
Our Field Day Playlist
Tell Josh to 'Approve' of us
Hey, it really was Escambria, not Escanaba. I blame my reading glasses:
Our guest, Dr. Johnathan Kramer, ESQ W6JLK is a lawyer dealing in ‘dirt’ - no, not Stormy Daniels... Real Estate. We’ll learn about his career and a bit about putting up antennas in HOA territory.
We had some technical trouble with the live stream this time… and with the local recording. Between the two, we recovered most of the show, with a few minutes missing in the middle. You won’t even know… but it might be a little confusing for those who watched live on YouTube, or came to the YouTube channel late, but before we replaced the video (it takes hours to do that. Now you know.
For the past 10 days, ARRL’s Logbook of the World and online courses have been down. Something slowed down QST production (the print version) for a day or two. But the website and email forwarding service are working.
What’s happening? ARRL is only saying that “a serious incident involving access to our network and systems” has occurred. Is it a fire in the engine room? Malware? Ransomware? Somebody didn’t pay the ISP? All those and more are filling the information vacuum. So are we 🙄😕
Meanwhile, we opened up the Zoom to viewers, and one - Dave VE3KM from… yes, Bastard, Ontario, clicked the button. Turns out that Dave is an avid VHF/UHF ham, among other things (actually, pretty well rounded in ham radio overall). So before we get started speculating (and Gary whining) about the ARRL infogap, Dave gives us a lesson in Aurora propagation. Yes, when a big dose of plasma from the sun 🌞 shuts down HF, VHF goes wild.
Do we solve the ARRL’s data issue, or even provide some useful insight? Nope. Nobody has. But we… maybe just Gary… feels better.
Part ONE
Episode 524 - New England Correspondent Marty NN1C takes us to the Hamvention, holds out in the pouring rain to see the rush of equally drowned hamfesters pour (too literally) through the entry gate at 9 AM, and then waits out ICOM’s BIG REVEAL of… circuit boards😕, with East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ anchoring from Fort Mill. West Coast Host David W0DHG got up early to join in.
Episode 525 - Gary K4AAQ goes solo, checking the feeds, and reviewing HamRadioNow (and ARVN)’s extensive catalog of Hamvention videos, going back to 2007. Find it all in this YouTube Playlist.
PART TWO
Gary K4AAQ is back from vacation, and we’re back on the air. A (relatively) short show - David W0DHG had some stuff to do, so just an hour. We do the usual ramble around a few topics. Gary shows his broken (and extracted) tooth and a home movie from Hawaii to wrap things up.
In theory, we’re on hiatus until May, but we had a few minutes to chat about the Hollywood Hills, David’s Emcomm deployment (no hams were harmed in that deployment), and a bit of eclipse.
Gary's Q-Mobile - now 17 years old and 230,000 miles long, is running fine. But the ICOM 7000 HF rig developed a hiccup on 40 meters. Put a little RF to the Tarheel 200 antenna, and it shut down. He finally gets around to fixing it.
David W0DHG told him how in a previous episode. Gary K4AAQ had to do it the hard way.
For the next few weeks, East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ and West Coast Host David W0DHG have a bunch of family and other activities, so we’re goona take a break from the show. David may gin up some shows solo (Gary will be gone lots longer)… we’ll see. But sooner or later we’ll be back… tanned and rested (or dragged ot and exhausted).
And a quick poll: Is the shot with Gary and David in the same picture:
A: Creepy
B: Very Creepy
I don’t care what anyone says, Gary is a genius
See ya on the other side!
Can the creating of a simple show jingle (using AI) drive the theme of the whole show?
Sure, why not. Also, a visit to the Charlotte Hamfest for a few minutes.
Also, can you guess the age of the average ARRL member? Stay tuned to find out!
The Network Effect is when you connect a network (IRLP, AllStar, Echolink, D-STAR, DMR, Fusion, etc) to a quiet, local repeater and turn on a busy nationwide or worldwide reflector, talk group, room, whatever. The repeater isn’t quiet anymore… but who’s talking. Nobody you know.
Also, Gary K4AAQ will be volunteering for a big, new (to him) event: the Assault on Mt. Mitchell. That’s a 100 mile bike ride from Spartanburg SC to the top of Mt. Mitchell in NC. With all the up and down (and the big UP at the end to the 6600’ summit), the riders will see a total of 11,000 of vertical climb.
And, we lost some hams this week. Bob Heil K9EID, of course, but also David W0DHG’s friend Gary Apgar NY6Y, and Gary’s friend and local hero Danny Hampton K4ITL. Danny was Dayton Hamvention’s Ham of the Year in 2009, and founder of a regional repeater network in the Carolinas, long before the Internet came along to make it easy.
Gary K4AAQ has that new phone/camera gimble and wireless podcast mics. So he’s got to go to a hamfest. Dayton it is! It’s been a while. No SIB (Studio In a Booth). Maybe they’ll let him sit in on the YouTuber’s Forum?
Then he and David W0DHG yammer about other stuff.
The Amateur Radio Emergency Preparedness Act is now in the Senate as S.3690. That bill joins House Bill H.R.4006, with the goal of giving hams living in HOA neighborhoods some reasonable relief in being able to put up antennas.
Don’t place your orders yet 🤨. Most Congrerssional bills never become law, but if you recall your Civics class, you do need identical legislation to be passed in the House and Senate before they move on to the President for their signature. So we’re a big step closer 😀.
Then surprise guest Kyle AA0Z joins us for the first time in a while for some general discussion.
If anyone wants to hear a little (a lot) more from Gary K4AAQ, he’s started a new general-interest (or generally uninteresting) podcast with his brother Jay. Jay isn’t a ham, though he grew up with it blaring in the house from his brothers. Like Gary, Jay is a retired broadcaster, now finding refuge in the world of podcasting. It’s called the Jay and Gary Show, on YouTube and a podcast app near you.
Equal time for David W0DHG who continues to co-host the WaveTalkers show on YouTube.
One sure path to YouTube stardom is to do a lot of unboxings. That may be why we don’t do them very often. But this time, we do one.
East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ was getting jealous of all the YouTubers walking around hamfests with their phones mounted on fancy sticks, and using some kind of wireless mic gizmo to talk to people (and hear them) more than six inches from the phone. So he bought a set, and opened it up live on this show while West Coast Host David W0DHG looked on over Zoom.
Next… a demo. Then… a hamfest? Dayton? Stay tuned.
Here’s what he got:
Trivia question #1: Who said that (To the Moon, Alice)?
Trivia question #2: What year did Gary K4AAQ say it was when he introduced this show?
We’re not answering those here. Watch (or listen to) the show.
In January, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) landed a ham radio station on the moon (along with some other stuff, we’re sure, but we have our priorities). Its one-watt transmitter sent some telemetry on 437.41 MHz, along with a cleverly embedded Morse code (not cw) signal, as received by these guys in the Netherlands, and partially decoded by this guy, with help from a few other very advanced hams (read the blog and comments). Best we can tell, it was just a little more advanced than OSCAR 1’s Hi Hi Hi back in 1961. But it still counts as the first freakin’ ham station on the moon. 🌜
The station has literally gone dark, as it slid into lunar night. 🌚 It’s not expected to survive, but we bet there’ll be some well equipped hams listening in a couple weeks, just to make sure.
How ‘well equipped’? Well, you need to make up about 40 dB of path loss, assuming you’ve got an excellent receiver. How do you do that? Big ass antenna. Nope… bigger.
Then Gary rambles on about the fate of HRN 506: How Can We Podcast With All This Light💡? That’s the show that nobody’s seen, because first YouTube, then Netflix, took it down until we fought to get it back up (and we won).
And finally, he talks about South Carolina’s unusual “First in the Nation” Presidential Primary, and the chat room confirms that what we’re doing here is very confusing. And once again what we thought would be a 10-minute show ran over an hour.
BTW, David W0DHG is out this week, teaching a First Aid class. We expect to be back next Sunday.
Gary K4AAQ just got back from a week of skiing 🤹♀️ with Cyndi KD4ACW out in Park City UT. David W0DHG has been busy, so not much show prep (good thing we’re not trying to make money off this show🤑). But Gary had a little radio operation (and one near-catastrophy) to talk about from his trip, including a short video of the radio-laden suitcase that got flagged at TSA. And David had some Winter Field Day adventures to relate. So another shortish show.
Earlier that day, Gary did a ‘sync-test’, looking to see what might have gone wrong with a couple of previous shows that had serious lip-sync issues. Not quite a ProMore, and interesting only to… probably nobody, but we won’t speak for you. Anyway, the lip-sync looked fine, both in the test and this show. Gary says he didn’t ‘fix’ anything, but maybe he didn’t ‘break’ anything either.
And we play a bit of a rockabilly song that features Ham Radio from a group called the Royal Hounds. The song is Tune In Tokyo.
Winter Field Day, the last full weekend in January. ❄⛄🏂🎿
Field Day - the summer version - is the most popular event on the ham radio calendar. The winter version isn’t even close, but it is a thing. And many hams are passionate about it. Our guest Marvin Turner W0MET, King of Winter Field Day (so dubbed by host Gary K4AAQ) tells us all about it.
The weather is kind of an upside-down, of course. While summer Field Day is more or less pleasant in the northern US and Canada, it’s hot and muggy in the southeast, and just hot in the west. Late January can be serious winter in the north, and more temperate as you head south, though ‘summer-like’ may be reserved for Florida.
Winter Field Day isn’t just the winter version of it’s summer event. Some rules are the same, but many are different. For one thing, ‘Winter’ Field Day is worldwide (with half the world actually being ‘summer’, but who’s counting). And it may be a bit more emcomm focused. Marvin tells us all about it.
For a short while, the ham radio world was abuzz with comments on a shot at the very end of the Netflix movie Leave the World Behind, about a NYC couple who rent a house on Long Island for a weekend getaway. The world quickly goes to hell, though they only get vague signs of it as TV, cable, internet and cell phone service goes out. Then weird things start happening around them. SPOILER ALERT At the very end of the movie, there’s a bunker with an elaborate ham station, receiving a digital message about cities being under attack and elevated radiation, advising anyone receiving the message to take shelter. The movie got fairly favorable critic reviews, but terrible audience reviews.
Gary K4AAQ and Cyndi KD4ACW were among the ‘terrible review’ contingent. David W0DHG hadn’t finished the movie yet, but after hearing Gary’s review, he was eager to see how bad it really was. Oh, and Gary plays a few clips to demonstrate what was so bad, and to show that ham station. Also… no Netflix takedown (so far).
But first… David and Gary look at an NBC TODAY Show clip of an Erie PA area high school ham club (actually an Advanced Technology Group) completing an ARISS contact. All ARISS contacts are special events, particularly for the groups and schools involved. What made this contact unusual is that 1) the students did all the work, and 2) it made Network level news. They also made the local news, and they have their own YouTube Channel with their own play-by-play of the event, and other group activities.
Here’s the link to our ARISS Playlist, including that 1992 SAREX contact.
A small Christmas Miracle (and really kind of pre-Christmas).
Netflix released their copyright©claim on HamRadioNow Episode 506: How Can We Podcast With All This Light💡? Just in time for nobody to see it (it’s up to 33 views as I type this).
So David W0DHG and Gary K4AAQ celebrate the win🎉🥂. David is short-time, so later, Gary goes into mind-numbing detail about how he filed disputes with YouTube that got Netflix to relent.
But first, they review the reaction to Episode 509: Repeater Pest Gets No-Contact Order from the Judge, which provoked strong and odd comments both on QRZ.com and Reddit.
Audio listeners are in for a ‘trreat’ at the very end.
Aka The Monkeyman Trial
WARNING: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE
A very wide coverage, busy UHF repeater in the Charlotte NC metro area had been plagued all year by a pest. Drunk, profane, nonsensical and relentless. Ignoring him didn’t work, so they tracked him down. The repeater owners told him to stop many times. He didn’t. The FCC told him to stop… twice. He didn’t. But now identified, he got his ham license: KQ4GAD. But nothing changed. The repeater was still frequently subject to his profanity, sound effects and music, and streams of nonsense.
As time passed, the pest increasingly directed his rants and ramblings toward one ham, Brad O’Dell KK1LL. Brad was leading the team that hunted the pest down and revealed his identity. Ramblings became threats, so at the suggestion of former FCC Enforcement Counsel Riley Hollingsworth K4ZDH, Brad swore out a complaint in NC Superior Court, asking for a ‘No Contact’ order.
After managing to avoid the process server twice, resulting in continuances, the pest, Joshua Duffy KQ4GAD, faced off with Brad in court. Duffy never spoke… at least not in the hearing. As the hearing begain, his attorney immediately offered to accept a No Contact order for one year, provided that no evidence was presented and made part of the record. Brad agreed. It was over.
But our story isn’t. In this episode, we’ll talk with Brad and Ted Williams KE6QEY, President of the Charlotte Amateur Radio Club, owner of the repeater. We will hear some audio of Duffy swearing, threatening and rambling (and we’re not beeping anything out, so this episode has some explicit language). We’ll hear briefly from Duffy himself in an interview he gave HRN’s Gary K4AAQ outside of court, where he describes what he did and why. And Brad and Ted will tell the whole story.
Oh… The Monkeyman Trial? That comes from the monkey-like sounds our pest was fond of making. You’ll hear one recording of that. So before the hams knew who he was, they called him ‘The Monkeyman’.
