QRP Fun with PCARS Every year, the Portage County Amateur Radio Service – aka PCARS – hosts a QRP contest at Fred Fuller Park in Kent, Ohio. This tradition goes back many years and it’s always a good time. Modes come and go and the rules shift a little, but mostly it’s an attempt to…
Worth Repeating I love my time outdoors. My family is into camping, hiking, and being on the water when we can. Our best times have been on trips to the woods and that’s a big reason for my affection for POTA. I absolutely love being outdoors. In NE Ohio, that can be a challenge for…
The First Activation of 2025: Solitude It was absolutely silent and completely deserted at West Branch SP – K-1999 on 19-Jan. It was Sunday morning at about 10:00 local time and the temperature was sitting at about 20dF. There was a steady 6mph wind and it was a safe bet that no one would be…
Just last week I decided to join the Straight Key Century Club (SKCC) because Jim N4JAW posted about it on his blog and it jives really well with my 2025 Goal to do more conversational CW. I got my number and plugged in my straight key. Cool? Cool! The very next day, I decided to…
QCX-mini? Didn’t You Just Finish A QMX+? Sometimes, things get shuffled around and end up on the back burner for a really, really long time. Embarassingly long. Back in January of 2022, I was embarking on my CW journey. I was also looking for a kit to build. The QRP Labs QCX-mini looked like exactly…
This Is The Hard Part Some time ago, I wrote a post about the mechanics of getting your license. I got a little ping from a fellow operator mentioning that it was probably time to talk a little bit about step 8 in my list of steps to getting licensed. That step is Getting On…
Why? If there is one good reason to put down some goals for the coming arbitrary time period, it’s to give a list of things one might do when one has time for the hobby but isn’t really inspired to engage with anything in particular. Sometimes, there’s a radio and some free time but spinning…
First, Goals for 2024 First, a review of the goals I set for 2024 and how I did. Kilo at US-1999 – This goal was completed in April of 2024. That felt pretty good and it went quickly. Given that it was my park of choice for most of the winter, it wasn’t exactly a…
Brought To You By… This post is about building a QRP Labs QMX+ transceiver. No, Hans G0UPL didn’t sponsor this. Someone else made it possible. That someone else is Brandon Sanderson aka BrandoSando aka B-Money. He released a book about a week ago and at that point I became a Stormlight Archive Widow™. My beautiful…
Learning New Things Over the past week or so, I have been spending a lot of time with rigctl. This started as an investigation of why I was having an issue with tying together a number of applications and slowly unraveled into a deep dive on the workings and potential of rigctl. It has been…