Ham radio might be forgotten... but it's not dead!

That's the phrase I put on a flier at the local library.

Really, it's not dead.

Lots of new people are getting into Ham radio.

As I'm getting to know more and more operators/stations, I find that many of them have suffered with bipolar or depression.

If it wasn't the involvement with Ham radio or other activities, they would have more trouble coping.

Previously, I think, I posted that another Ham, Harry, in the area and I bought a couple of those QRP CW (morse code) transceiver radios for $10 on eBay.

They're the latest Pixie radios, version 4.1, and run on 9v batteries or up to 12v with 8 (AAA/AA/C/D) cells or a car battery/12v adapter, etc. etc.

Last night Harry and I finally got time and radios setup to communicate with this little radios.

Now, our Morse code skills are still developing, but it was very exciting!

One, we were able to finally communicate using these little boxes, and two we started planning out how to make the setups better and better.

The major snag with our setup, was that Harry had to manually swap the antenna between two different antennas.

Harry was using his HF loop to transmit, but he cannot receive on the Pixie.  If he tries to listen on the Pixie, he gets the local radio station.  He's still sorting that out.

I was using my 1/4 wave 2 meter, coat hanger "droopy", antenna for the communication.

It seemed to work pretty well at 1/4 wave 2 meter.

The radios are communicating in the 40 meter band, so 1/4 wave 2 meter is approx. 1/80th the length of a 40 meter antenna.

Not ideal, but it was working!

Neither of us have those programmatic keys to keep our keying steady, which is OK.  Neither of us really good and sending/receiving at almost any speed worth a shit.

I like Ham radio, as there aren't really any standards for CW speeds, except that when communicating, you should communicate at the speed of the slower operator.

Last night, after we were done, I tried to copy an audio file from www.morseresource.com at 8wpm, and was still trying to write down the dits & dahs, instead of letters.

I'll have to work on my mental translating of the audio sounds to letters.

Well, I need to get back to work, but I wanted to get this documented as it was pretty darn fun.