Fall Antenna Projects – A New Low-Band Receive Antenna System

Anita and I like to take advantage of the mild fall weather to do antenna projects at our QTH. We have completed two such projects this fall – the installation of a Two-Element Phased Receive System and a rebuild of the control cable interconnect system at the base of our tower. Our first project was the … Continue reading

Summertime Station and Antenna Projects At AB1OC/AB1QB

Summer is the time of year that many of us work on our antennas and improve our stations. Anita AB1QB and I did both at our QTH this summer. Removing Lower SteppIR Yagi From Tower Our SteppIR DB36 Yagis were due for some maintenance, so we took them off our tower. A special thanks to all the Nashua … Continue reading

Software Defined Radio/Remote Operating Gateway Part 1 – System Design And Hardware Installation

Flex-6700 Software Defined Radio And Remote Operating Gateway We’ve been planning to add a remote operating capability to our station for some time now. We also did some previous work with a FlexRadio Software Defined Radio (SDR) in our station, and we felt that an SDR would be a good platform to build a remote operating project … Continue reading

Software Defined Radio/Remote Operating Gateway Part 2 – Client/Server Setup And Software

Remote Operating Gateway Client/Server Architecture The next step in our Software Defined Radio/Remote Operating Project was to build a Remote Operating Gateway System in our shack and set up Client PCs to operate our station remotely. In a previous article, we explained how we integrated a FlexRadio 6700 Software Defined Radio (SDR) into our station to … Continue reading

2014 Amateur Radio Highlights

It is again time for our annual 2014 Year Amateur Radio highlights post. First, I’d like to thank our readers for their continued interest in our Blog. Our blog was viewed about 100,00 times in 2014 from 165 countries worldwide. You, our readers, have made 2014 our busiest year yet, and this provides Anita (AB1QB) … Continue reading

Station Automation Part 1 – microHAM SO2R And System Design

As some of our readers probably know, it has been part of our plan from the beginning to setup our station for multi-SO2R operation . We took the first step in this direction some time back with the installation of a microHAM MK2R+ SO2R Controller (the box one top of the left radio in the picture … Continue reading

AB1QB Enters The 2014 JARTS RTTY Contest – Our First Use Of N1MM+

One of Anita’s (AB1QB) favorite contests in the JARTS RTTY Contest. We decided to use the new N1MM+ Logger for the first time in this contest. There are many new features and improvements in N1MM+. A summary of N1MM+’s enhancements can be found here. We opted to do a completely clean installation of N1MM+ (rather … Continue reading

An Introduction To The DXLab Suite

I recently had the opportunity to do a presentation introducing the DXLab Software Suite for several local radio clubs. The idea was to provide a fairly comprehensive introduction to DXLab and to show how it can be used to make Amateur Radio operations, QSL’ing, and Award Management easier and more enjoyable. There are several good … Continue reading

ARRL Centennial Convention This Week – Come Join Us In Hartford!

Anita (AB1QB) and I will be attending the ARRL Centennial Convention in Hartford Connecticut, USA this coming weekend. We are looking forward to seeing the vendor exhibits, Contest University and the many fine forum presentations which are scheduled. I will be doing a presentation on the design, construction and operation of our station at the ARRL … Continue reading

Station Automation Part 3 – Antenna Cutover And Final Integration

The final article in our microHAM installation series will be about our station’s cut-over, configuration, and integration testing. The first step was to bring the second radio in Anita’s (AB1QB) position into the microHAM system. We also added a PR 781 microphone and boom from Heil Sound to her setup at the same time. Anita’s … Continue reading