This new version has the audio fixed.. the hum is gone thanks to a helpful ham radio operator Kieth K1KOS.
Frank Gilliland NØIGZ is a Silent Key after passing on September 24, 2023. Frank will be remembered as a great ham operator, a great friend and great man. We would also like to apologize for the background hum.. technical issues we could not fix. Included is a couple of photos and the net log from that night.... enjoy and 73!
Interview by Chris Hunt NØYH
Previously posted on the Kilowatt Amateur Radio Club Site
Part 1: The Early Years 11 March, 2023
Oswego, the county seat of Labette county, is located 12 miles north of the Oklahoma state line and about 30 miles west of the Missouri line in grid EM27. It was the outgrowth of a trading post established in the early '40s. Up till 1865 there were no ‘white persons’ in the community and the place was called "White Hair's Village" because an Indian chief of that name made his home there. In 1865 several settlers located at this point and the name was changed to "Little Town." Two years later the Oswego Town Company was organized and so named for Oswego, N. Y., whence many of the settlers had come. Today, 1,658 people call Oswego home.
Oswego is a typical rustic mid-western city steeped in history where the residents’ wave at anyone passing by, even a stranger. Downtown has parking in the middle of main street as well as both sides. The streets are clean, along with the air, and the nearby Neosho River supplies fresh water and recreation. One feels as if they have stepped back in time to a simpler life where neighbors know neighbors and contracts are signed with a handshake.
Only a few blocks away from the nostalgic Oswego Drug Store is the location of a local man who also calls Oswego his home. He is slim, advanced in years, well groomed, and tied to an oxygen bottle. And while his body may be frail, his mind is as sharp as a tack. His name is Frank and his callsign is N0IGZ.
I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Frank in his home for this interview. I only knew Frank from talking on the radio and stories told by other hams. From them I learned that Frank is held in high regard within the radio community, and I just had to meet him in person. This is Frank’s story.
Visible in his backyard is the vertical he installed a few years ago after moving in. I was graciously let in by Frank’s daughter, Dawn, who led me to his shack. Frank was sitting at his radio desk doing what he loved, rag-chewing with other Hams. After introducing myself, I sat down and the eyeball QSO began.
Before beginning the interview, Frank said to me, “I don’t get on the radio as much as I used to. I’m usually in bed by 9pm. Mostly because my medications cause me to slur my words and make me sound drunk, which I don’t do…anymore.”
Frank has an Icom 7100, and a 7300, and while he likes his 7300, he’s not a fan of the 7100. Also on his desk is an IC-7410 sitting idle. Across his desk are the usual meters, tuners, and amplifiers, all neatly organized, glowing brightly in the dim room like Christmas lights.
K0KWC: Where were you born?
Frank: “Columbus, Kansas.”
K0KWC: When did you move to Oswego?
Frank: “2019 or 2020. The wife and I were staying at a Senior Citizens place here. My wife was sick with cancer and passed away in 2020. My daughter said, ‘Dad why don’t you move in with me? You won’t have to pay that high dollar rent and you can put up your antennas.’ I jumped on that like a bird on a bug.”
K0KWC: Tell me about your childhood growing up in Columbus.
Frank: “Well, I grew up in Dodge City and my dad was killed in 54 in a blizzard. That was in February 54. We stayed in Dodge another year and we moved back to Columbus. Mom went to beautician school with her sister, and they became beauticians with their own shop. Of course, I was raised in Columbus. I always had short hair. No drugs growing up. No drugs of any kind. Then I went to night school where I tried a little bit of pot. Well, I got just as big a buzz from a 6 pack as I did pot, so pot went away. But I don’t smoke pot.
K0KWC: What year were you born?
Frank: “1946. My dad worked for Thermo-Electric working on bombs in California before I was born. Mom always told me stories about a dark colored car pulling up in front of the house and dad would go out and get in the car. Then about 10 or 15 minutes later he would come back in the house. He worked for the CIA.”
K0KWC: What do you think he was working on that involved the CIA?
Frank: “I don’t know. Dad was a welder. A foreman actually. He never discussed it with my mom.”
K0KWC: How did you get started in Ham Radio, Frank?
Frank: “I was into CBs big time, towers, beams, amplifiers. I had a Clipperton-L amplifier from Dentron, 1200 watts, on 11 meters. My Elmer, from Chetopa, was a Ham Radio operator. WD0G. He is a silent key now. He found out I had a CB radio. My amplifier was either full bore or nothing, and nobody could outdo me. And they didn’t. A local Ham, Gus, always started his sentences with, ‘I guess we’ll have to do it this way’. Everything started with I Guess except he would say I guss…, so we all called him Gus. That’s how he got his nick name, Gus. One day Gus called me on the phone. How he got my number I have no idea. He told me to shut that thing off! What are you talking about? <chuckle> He said, ‘I monitored your transmission. You about shook my radio off the desk.’ Well, I told him where to go, real quick. About 3 days later he shows up in my driveway. He gets out and this guy is 6 ft 2. I’m gonna get my *** whipped here. Well, I didn’t. He came in and looked the situation over. He said, ‘Tell you what I’ll do. How would you like to be a Ham Radio operator? You can talk all over the world.’ Yea, I would like to try that. He Elmered me along with another Elmer, W0JRP, John Tootingham. He said come over to Joplin. Gus got hold of John. They were on 2 meters. Maybe I better back up. In 1957, my first Elmer was W0QZJ, Bill Glasgow. He ran a TV shop in Columbus. He would get his ARRL book, sit on the floor and go through it. I started working on my code. Meantime I was able to make a contact on 2 meter to Sam Ross, K0QZW. He lived in Cherokee, KS.
K0KWC: How old were you when you got your first license?
Frank: “I didn’t get my first license. Girls came along. Chasing girls and looking at cars. I made my first 2m contact to Sam Ross in Cherokee, KS from Bill’s house.”
K0KWC: How old were you when you made your first contact?
Frank: “Ten or twelve. I was into cars, big time. Cars came before the girls. Then the girls showed up. I said the heck with Ham Radio. I’m going to build a car.”
K0KWC: So, after the girls and the cars, when did you finally get your license?
Frank: “In the 70’s.”
K0KWC: So, you’ve been a Ham for 50 years?
Frank: “I never thought about it that way. Wow, I’ve been around a while. I took a class over at Joplin. W0JRP was one of the instructors. The other instructor I can see him but I can’t remember his name. He was an Extra class. John was Extra class. I took the class and went through all the paperwork, then started working on the code. One day, John says Ok, everybody take their paper and pencil out. They had a recorder, you had to do 5 words a minute for Novice class. And he ran through that. He says, OK, what you all don’t know is that we are counting this one. I passed. I got my code. And next meeting we took the paperwork test and I passed it. I got my license. 1976 maybe? Somewhere in there.”
KOKWC: What was your first radio as a Novice?
Frank: “My other Elmer had a 2m Realistic crystal controlled. That was my first radio. I don’t remember what model. It was a joke. And then the next radio was a handheld. And I stuck a 2m dipole in a tree. I made it out of a chassis mount 239 and some wire, put a loop in it, and used a string to pull it up into a tree. Then I could get into Joplin, and Pittsburg. You could get into Pittsburg from Tulsa back then. They had 2 antennas, one pointing up and one pointing down. It had a funny way of receiving. I can’t remember now. N5SD could tell you all about that. Archie Meeks was the overseer of that. He is a SK now.
Part 2: The Ham and the Man
KOKWC: Tell me about your early Ham days as an operator.
Frank: “I had a Kenwood 830 for HF, and I made a 10m beam. I remember making it in the yard. Gus came over and helped. I can’t remember what 2m radio I had. I must have had a million of them. I was on it a lot. But in the meantime, Gus said, if I get you through this, you’ve got to sell the amp. I couldn’t use it. I was limited to 100 watts. So, we went to a Hamfest in Missouri somewhere and I sold it. It was in mint condition. It had new tubes, fresh paint, it looked brand new. The Clipperton amp was named after Clipperton island. They were big in demand at that time. Dentron made them. We sold the amp, I came back, and Gus asked if I heard about 6m. No, what’s that about? Gus was talking to the Caribbean on 6m. The Solar Cycle was just coming up, getting strong. On 6m! The VHF band. I didn’t have a 6m radio. Gus said we will find one. Gus & I did find one for $125. Gus couldn’t drive cause he was legally blind but he could see good enough to tune the radios. Another Ham from Erie I had met in Parsons, he sold me the radio and guaranteed it to work. I only had $120. Bill said I’ll give you $5. The guy said, no, no, he can have it for $120. Then I had to borrow $5 from Bill for gas to get home. I got me a 6m radio. Yaesu 620B. Supposed to be 20 watts out. I did good to get 15. Sometimes only 12. I think the finals were getting bad. Of all my DX on 6m, over 525 grids, 90% of those were obtained with 10 watts. It was the peak of a cycle. Except for the people my age, people don’t know what a sun cycle peak is. We haven’t had one like that since. You work 6m when it wants you to. They call it the Magic band, and it is magic. Gus and I would get on 6m and talk till midnight on 6m. We were sitting there talking when a station came on, 3D2. I didn’t know who it was. Gus couldn’t talk. He knew who it was. It was Fiji, in the South Pacific. We talked for 15 minutes. I worked Fiji on 10 watts. I once worked Australia on 6m with a mobile. He was also mobile. He was going home from a Hamfest when I contacted him. That made my day.
KOKWC: Was that your most memorable contact?
Frank: “3D2 station comes to mind, and a station in Bosnia. He apologized for the guns going off. They were fighting a war. They were our guns. He apologized for the noise in the background. I could hear them going off. 105mm Howitzers. He apologized to me for the US guns. Another contact that comes to mind is a Russian contact. I worked him on cw. He was a wood cutter in Siberia. He was by himself cutting wood with an axe. A tractor pulling a sled brought in his supplies. I heard him again on voice but I didn’t get to talk to him on voice. Anyways, I got the card! I need a new DX log. This one is coming apart. There are new countries now." <Frank begins reading the countries he has worked on 6m. It was vast.> "Galapagos Island. I talked to him enough we were on a first name basis. It was nothing to get Galapagos then."
KOKWC: What is your favorite thing about Ham?
Frank: “6 meters.”
KOKWC: What is your least favorite thing about radio?
Frank: “6 meters because I don’t have an antenna. Probably 20. The operators are arrogant, know-it-all’s, run humungous power, and don’t give a s*** about their neighbor. Probably 20.”
KOKWC: What was the best advice you ever received from an Elmer?
Frank: “All verticals transmit poorly in all directions. I’ve never had a vertical until this one. Except for 2 meters. And he was right.”
KOKWC: What is your opinion of digital radio? FT8, FT4, JT65?
Frank: “When you can go in and shoot gnats in a barrel, that’s FT8. I’ve run FT8. You can’t beat voice. CW I don’t do anymore. I can’t hear it. And my finger wiggling is probably not good either.”
KOKWC: Where do you think Ham Radio is headed in the next 50 years?
Frank: “Digital. There are some diehards, my age, that may live to be 100. They’ll still carry on voice. I lived long enough to go digital. Starting to get some younger people in. They’re into computer stuff, that’s what’s going to attract them, I think. When I got in, we didn’t have computers. My first computer was a Commodore 64. And you could talk to Elvira, and that was about it.” <chuckle>
KOKWC: What advice do you have for any new Hams today?
Frank: “Be considerate. Some people are slow learners, slow thinkers." <pause> "Just be considerate.”
KOKWC: Tell me something about yourself that might surprise people who know you?
Frank: “About me? I think everyone knows I don’t get around anymore. Pretty much everyone knows the do’s and don’t’s of Frank. I can’t think of anything. My wife was also an operator. She was a Technician. Her call sign was KV0...Real Exciting Navaho. She was Indian, but she wasn’t Navaho. She was Osage with red hair. She said, ‘I like pale face scalps with handles.’ Holy ****. I’m gonna sleep with one eye open. Her name was Virgie, Toad. They all knew her by Toad on the radio. She wasn’t on much. She had two QSL cards by locals, that’s all. “
KOKWC: How did she get the handle Toad?
Frank: “When she was little, she would get in the crib on all 4, and she would do that, like a toad. Toad, Toadie, people we’ve been friends with for 30 years call her Toadie, even today.”
KOKWC: Do you have any last thoughts? Maybe something I didn’t cover, or you would like to add?
Frank: “I wished my lungs were better than what they are. I would have a better place to live and a tower up. Oswego’s not bad. Higher than Columbus, I think. Coming up that hill, it’s not as high as you think it is over Columbus. But you stay dry up here. The river is way down there. No flooding.”
KOKWC: Frank, long after the vacuum tubes cool off, and dust has settled on the cover of your transceiver, how would you like to be remembered?
Frank: “Just as, I got zapped! On my QRZ page, it shows as a vanity. It’s not a vanity. That was my call from my Technician license. We moved away from here to Sterling Kansas and I let my license elapse. I had to go back and do all this BS over again. I didn’t have to take code. So, it shows that they had W0IGZ, N0IGZ, and K0IGZ. I could have taken the W and made everyone think that I had been in it for a super long time. Everybody knew me as I Got Zapped. So I picked N0IGZ, me original call.”
KOKWC: Have you been zapped?
Frank: “Oh hell yes! I got knocked out. I had an amplifier. My Elmer always told me, ‘work with one hand in your pocket’. Like an idiot, I was going to move… my finger touched that tube cap and it put me out. It knocked me out of the chair. My wife heard the chair go down. She came in and I was out. Got a wet washcloth and I came to and I said, ‘What the hell happened?’ I see the amp, then I knew what happened. I never did it again. I got tickled on my lip by a D104 microphone. It left a little black hole. It was funny later.”
Conclusion:
I could have easily spent another hour with Frank just talking about cars, computers, and radios. He was certainly willing, but I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. I thanked Frank for his time and for sharing a small moment of his life with me. He told me it had been fun and brought back some good memories.
I left Oswego that day with a new appreciation for the town, it’s people, and their local treasure, an unassuming Ham called Frank, N…Zero…I…Got…Zapped.
Chris Hunt, N0YH
It's time for another meeting!! On September 9th at 9am at Fire Station #1 in Pittsburg, let's get a good turnout as we have lots to discuss like repeater maintenance updates, maybe a Fall Special Event, Winter Field Day. As always we will have club provided breakfast casserole, coffee etc etc. Oh and most likely donuts! After the meeting we will all go out to the fire department grounds and get a complete tour on the incredible communications trailer that Justin KEØWSY, Tyler KBØPQP and Matt KGØW have put together. If you have not seen it, this is your chance! This thing can almost do it all and talk with almost anybody.
We are looking for a presenter or program of some sort so if you have ideas or suggestions please let us know! It's been a while and there are a lot of faces that we haven't seen in a while so mark your calendar, set a reminder on your phone, put it on the bulletin board!
Keynote is Robert Suggs talks about radio communications during the moon missions.
“How we talked from the Moon: the Apollo communication system”
Fifty years ago astronauts were exploring the surface of the moon. The communication system was one of many technology developments needed for the Apollo program. Basics of the architecture of the Apollo system and a preview of our current lunar exploration plans will be described.
Here is a recent post regarding an FCC regarding an FCC petition that from what it seems, could affect the amateur radio band allocation regarding band edge interference? I see people online saying "EMERGENCY ACT NOW!!" and I see others saying "whoooaaa there boy crying wolf!" So which is it?
Can someone with more expertise weigh in on this? I did find this line in the FCC Petition (LINK BELOW) ..... "Specifically, we consider five frequencies within this range: 4.9,
10.2, 14.9, 19.9, and 24.8 MHz." So would this even affect us? Much smarter folks that I may be able to provide better info for us?
A Petition FCC for High Power Allocation on Shortwave Spectrum
We were recently contacted by Cheryl in Galena about some radio gear left my her SK dad WB0BLM. If any of you are interested in this gear please email her at her email address Cherylann432 @ gmail.com and she will make arrangements. I have included photos below so if you would like any of this gear, let her know! Thanks Cheryl !! Below is her contact message that we received.
"I am KA0OEB (expired) and located in Galena Ks. My dad, a long-time ham radio operator (WB0BLM-Gary Kennedy) recently passed away and my mom and I are looking for someone to give his radio equipment to. I can take pictures of what we have. We both would love to see them go to someone who will put them back into use."
Here are some photos and video clip from Field Day this year... take a look and we hope to see you at the next one!
Well the SEKARC Field Day 2023 was a success! The location of the Crawford County Historical Museum worked out very well. So well that we told them that we are planning on this site for our 2024 Field Day as well. We gave a donation to their cause for the use of the facility and they appreciated having us. One of the things I learned is that we need to provide the museum lobby with an informational display about what we are doing in hopes to inform their visitors.
A morning thunderstorm delayed our setup but we were pretty much ready to go by start time. But it sure did add to the humidity level Saturday! WOW it was hot! Our trademark extension ladder antenna went up well and gets easier each time. Tyler mentioned on the net that we might want to make a mono band antenna built specifically for 20 as that seems to be the busiest band all day AND night on Field Day. We also raised a multi band dipole that seemed to have some issues with the signal getting out but seemed to receive well. Lot's of learning for us this time around.
Late Saturday we were not planning on staying over night to operate but about 10:30pm the air conditioning went out in the trailer which solidified the decision to not operate all night. We shut things down, moved the generator back to it's secure location for the night and came back the next morning. Back on the air about 6am and making lots of contacts. Weather was a lot better Sunday. Warm but a nice breeze and the humidity was much lower. We stopped at 1pm and the results are below.
Thanks to all that we able to contribute with their time and skills... special thanks to Tyler and Justin for what may be the best privately owned emergency communications trailer in the Midwest. Excellent work and we are planning on having a club meeting soon centered on the trailer. We are also as a club considering making a donation to the trailer equipment by purchasing a mini pc running about $350 so both stations in the trailer can have it's own pc to process with. If you as a club member want us to hold off and reconsider that donation then let us/me know.
Here are the details from the Field Day Log Reporting! THANKS to all that helped.. let's make next year even BETTER. I am working on a slide show of photos from the event so stay tuned for that in the next day or so.
Please complete form below completely !!
Please submit your information so we can get some counts for operators, food and setup/takedown help at the Field Day 2023 site. It is at the Crawford County Historical Museum near 20th and the Bypass in Pittsburg. This should be a really great site for Field Day and we hope to have one our best ever. If you have any questions please email the group and we will get the answers!
Click the text below for map if you are not familiar with where it is!
Oregon to Tennessee on 1/2 a watt and a breadboard!
With all of the recent hot activity on 10m I thought this story would be fun to share. One of the guys in this QSO had just finished building on breadboards his receiver and transmitter.... heard a call and went for it !!
Here is a first power up video from Ham Radio Outlet for the brand new Yaesu FTM-500D radio! This is the new top of the line mobile that looks very nice! I really like the new slide in/out mounting bracket. Break your piggy bank and order one of these beauties.... and write a review for our website!
"Communication is possible due to interactions between our Sun and the ionosphere, the ionized region of the Earth’s atmosphere located roughly 80 to 1000 km overhead. The upcoming eclipses (October 14, 2023, and April 8, 2024) provide unique opportunities to study these interactions. As you and other HamSCI members transmit, receive, and record signals across the radio spectrum during the eclipse, you will create valuable data to test computer models of the ionosphere."
This Hackaday website provides information and links where all ham operators can contribute to the research being done. By the way if you are not familiar with the Hackaday Site.... you are missing out. Check it all out!
We had a great meeting Saturday back at the fire station. Breakfast was completely eaten, donuts courtesy of Barb Tandy, or Steve Tandy or Terry Jackson? There was some confusion with the credit card haha! Great coffee courtesy of Home Brew Coffee and also thanks to them we had a door prize winner of a Home Brew Coffee Mug, Bill WBØLXZ!
Lot's of updates since we haven't met in so long but most importantly we have made some pending decisions on Field Day 2023 so stay tuned for updates on that. Tyler gave a complete Repeater update along with information on the status of the ARES/AuxComm progress.
We elected new officers for 2023 and 2024. Matt Kassawara KGØW was elected Club President, Steve Tandy NØSLT Vice President and Jeff Chancey KAØEGE Secretary/Treasurer. Matt KØVLL continues as our VE Coordinator. Congratulations to the new faces.
This ham I have posted before, he has great videos and I highly recommend his YouTube Channel. This build is similar to the antenna I first built for portable work and it worked GREAT! I used a "crappie pole", speaker wire and an Altiods Tin as my feed point connectors. Here he demonstrates this kind of build and shows video of his results!
Just a reminder and additional information for our club meeting on Saturday April 29th at 9am in the Fire Station#1 Training Room in Pittsburg. The address is 911 W 4th, and most of the parking is in the rear and enter on the east end.
Like the good ol' days we will have coffee but this time it will be (donated by Home Brew Coffee), a coffee company started by HAMS! There will be breakfast casserole and donuts! We have a few topics like Club Elections, Field Day 2023, planning a Foxhunt and other ideas.
What are you thoughts on the May meeting? For sure we will have to finalize some Field Day plans since that is the last meeting before Field Day which is June 24th-25th.
In honor of Major League Baseball Opening Day.... PLAY BALL AND Get On The Air!!
From the KB9VBR YouTube Channel !!
"A viewer asked: "I am curious if there is a particular reason you haven't added an amplifier to your shack equipment?" Joe and I talk about if an amp is an necessary piece of ham radio equipment and if you should invest in one."
KB9VBR VHF/UHF Antennas:
http://www.jpole-antenna.com
Looking for the best mobile radio? Great video here on that topic! Some of you remember this guy from the Joplin Hamfests! HamRadio 2.0
More details to follow but keep the date open! If you have not been there, parking in rear and the door to enter is on the right in the back.
Here is the calendar info...
Well... it's actually been 10 years since the first post on SEKARC and the club was started. I think we should all be proud of what we have built over the years. Field Days, meetings, coffee's, park events and the big Mining History Special Events!
Let's keep it rolling and growing! The link below takes you to our first post on Feb 23, 2013.
Nice short video regarding fan dipoles. Easy to build, multi band and not that costly! Give one a try! Have you built one? What are your thoughts? I built one and it worked well. Made mine for 70, 20 and 40 meters. I used a Balun Design feed point balun and it was up about 25 feet. Worked good but not the best for getting lots of DX due to it's radiant angle.
I am sure some of you veteran hams have... but I think today I had my second Feld Hell (Hellschreiber) QSO. See videos below of actual signal and the decoding. I was using Ham Radio Deluxe for the QSO.
Here is some history regarding Feld Hell that I learned after the QSO. My interest was peaked and I thought it would make a good post for our website. The source of the information below was from these two websites.
Introduction To Hellschreiber Modes
"The traditional method of sending Hellschreiber by radio is to key a Morse-type (CW) transmitter ON for every black spot in a text character,and OFF for every white place. Different parts of each character are sent at different times. The technique is still in use by interested Amateurs, communicating world-wide. This mode is now called Feld-Hell (Field-Hell), since the pre-war format still used was originally used for field communications by the German Army. Feld-Hell offered good immunity to interference and provided a clandestine transmission capability, because nothing was transmitted until a key was pressed. Commercial variations of Feld-Hell could still be heard occasionally on HF up until the 1980s, transmitting Chinese and Korean characters."
"Feld-Hell characters are sent as a series of dots at 122.5 pixels/sec, using a CW transmitter, or these days, by sending tones to an SSB transmitter. Black dots are represented by a CW dot (key down), and white spaces by a space as long as one dot (key up). The timing requirements are quite precise, like FAX, but Rudolf Hell developed a simple but clever technique, which involves printing the text twice, which can negate the effects of phase and small timing errors, thus avoiding the need for true synchronism."
This video shows the demo we showed at Hamvention 2022, in Dayton, Ohio.
This demonstrates the core underlying technology behind what we’re calling “SDRconnect”
“SDRconnect” is the new name for the multiplatform version of SDRuno (up till now we called it SDRuno V2)
We demonstrated the completely rewritten Core DSP engine for Spectrum and Waterfall displays – with the prototype software running on a Mac M1 computer. We also show the networking capability by remotely accessing an RSP based in the UK.
This is still an early stage demo, and the software team have a lot to do to complete the graphical user interface.
Work is underway on the new graphical user interface which:
• Retains the style and popular features of SDRuno
• Offers a more consistent and intuitive layout
• Addresses fixes and improvements suggested by users ever since SDRuno was first adopted.
Jim Szabo of SanCap Ariel had recently posted some of his work on Facebook and I thought the club would appreciate these photos. I met Jim through the Sanibel Island Facebook groups and was fortunate to spend some time with him and his lovely wife when he lived on Sanibel. Fortunately he moved well before Hurricane Ian devastated the island and the surrounding area.
He currently lives near Tampa Florida and has been doing drone work and is FAA Certified For All Aerial Photographic Needs in Commercial Real Estate, Construction Updates, Tower Inspections, SAR, Developer Portfolios, Public Safety and has recently retired.
Nice to know you Jim and we hope to meet again... and yes I will bring you more molasses crinkles and NO, this HAM guy doesn't wear overalls!! Love these shots!
From "The Voice of ChatGPT is on the air" by Hackaday Please read the whole post, it's very interesting. And a little unsettling. Did I write this... or did ChatGPT?
"AIs can now apparently carry on a passable conversation, depending on what you classify as passable conversation. The quality of your local pub’s banter aside, an AI stuck in a text box doesn’t have much of a living quality. human. An AI that holds a conversation aloud, though, is another thing entirely. [William Franzin] has whipped up just that on amateur radio. (Video, embedded below.)
The concept is straightforward, if convoluted. A DSTAR digital voice transmission is received, which is then transcoded to regular digital audio. The audio then goes through a voice recognition engine, and that is used as a question for a ChatGPT AI. The AI’s output is then fed to a text-to-speech engine, and it speaks back with its own voice over the airwaves.
[William] demonstrates the system, keying up a transmitter to ask the AI how to get an amateur radio licence. He gets a pretty comprehensive reply in return."
Here is an example I came up with after logging into ChatGPT.
Here is a great video that kind of goes along with the previous post about POTA activations. This amateur operator K4OGO also has many great videos so check those out here on YouTube!
I have been thinking about chasing the many Parks on The Air (POTA) stations since everyday on HF it seems there are POTA activations all over the bands. So I began to look in to it some. I found this POTA intro video below and I encourage you to check it out below! I also found these websites with helpful information and spotting.
I then reached out to one our local operators that does a lot of activations for POTA to get his input. Dennis WØHL and he has been working and calling CQ for POTA many years. Here are his thoughts on working POTA.
"POTA, Parks on the Air, has brought so much life back to Amateur radio. I see comments all the time that POTA has got me back on the air.
I started hunting POTA activators back in Fall of 2018. Fun but I wanted to get out and activate portable. My first activation as an Activator was October of 2019. Like I tell people, once you activate you are hooked!! I started with a Yaesu FT-891 which is a great radio. It was fun running 50 watts but I kept seeing these Activators running low power. I have also wanted to run QRP. So I bought a Xiegu G-90. Output was 20 watts. Great radio and no problem working even the DX stations. I did not do much activating in 2020. I did have a friend who was looking for a FT-891 and had an ICOM IC-7300 he wanted to trade. Being the ICOM person that I am, I jumped on the deal. I mainly use the 7300 for digit operation. That would be PSK31, Olivia, Rtty, etc. Yes even SSTV has been used. I don’t do the FT-8 mode. I like to do the work but a lot of people activate using FT-8.
I was very active last year. I had 59 activations for the year. Not a lot for some people but I was happy with it. I should mention that my wife got me an Elecraft KX-3 for Christmas in 2020. One of my goals for the year was to get back on CW. I have been activating using 15 watts on SSB and most of the time only 5 watts on CW. It is amazing what you can do with 5 watts.
My goal for 2023 is activating a summit. It is known as SOTA. Summits on the Air. We do have some areas in Missouri that qualify. I enjoy chasing the SOTA guys who are up on those high mountains only running 5 watts into a piece of wire.
Awards? Yes for both the Activator and Hunter. You just create an account on the POTA website and all awards are there for you to download as an PDF. You may already have an award and not know it.
If you are interesting POTA, please check out www.parksontheair.com."
Dennis Kimrey
W0HL
This a fascinating story I ran across on YouTube. Very interesting telling how two teenage "hams" made living/working at the South Pole in the 1950's better using their amateur radio station in New Jersey.
"The eleven nations included in the Antarctic portion of the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year created several permanent research stations, including the first permanent station at the South Pole. The effort to create a permanent scientific presence at, literally, the end of the earth required enormous effort of scientists and military personnel. Aided, uniquely, by a couple of teenagers from New Jersey."
This is an excellent explanation of a j-pole build, it's ohms and it's DC vs RF grounding. Dave KEØOG always produces great material. I recommend following him and I plan on posting more of these here so stay tuned!
