Pattern and Match

Top band season will soon wrap up for me. While giving a tour of my station to a visiting contester the snow and ice was sufficiently thawed...

In my first years as ham, oh so long ago, I had no money and could not afford decent equipment. Those days I used a Hammarlund HQ129X receiv...

A very long time ago I had an 80' length of ancient RG58 so bad that a penniless teenager like myself was prepared to throw it out. A fr...

When I was first licensed in 1972 conditions were on a rapid slide downward from a mediocre solar maximum into a long, deep trough. Adding t...

Maintenance. There's a word to strike terror into the heart of any ham. Especially when it's needed at exactly the wrong time: the m...

Recently I was asked to design a reversible 3-element wire yagi. The constraints were a maximum height of 30' (9 meters) and inverted ve...

A few weeks ago I received a preview LCR (log check report) for the recent CQ WW CW contest. There is a dreadful commonality among my LCRs f...

Last month I listed a few of the ideas I'm considering for a better and permanent 160 meter antenna. One of those is to tune my two big...

Waiting for spring It's that time of year to look ahead and make my plans for the 2019 station construction season. I've made a ...

One of the many projects I did not get done in 2018 was putting up more receive antennas for the low bands. The delay is due to its relative...