AF7NK

Welp. I burned out my XPA125B amplifier. Don’t ask me how. One day it worked, the next day it didn’t. Back to 10 watts on the IC-705 for me. On the bright side, I picked up an ICOM ID-52A over the summer. It’s a nice little handheld, and here’s the neat part: it uses the same battery as the IC-705. One less proprietary battery ecosystem to worry about. Small victories. ...

Remember when I said “maybe” I’d do something with my license this decade? Turns out I actually meant it. I bought an ICOM IC-705. And a Xiegu XPA125B amplifier to go with it. And a power supply to run the whole thing. The slippery slope of amateur radio gear acquisition is real, folks. For the antenna, I strung up an end-fed half-wave from a pole I attached to the chimney down to the back of the yard. It’s not pretty, but it works. Thankfully I don’t have an HOA! ...

Ten years. My amateur radio license lasted ten years. And in that decade I… sent some APRS packets from hiking trails and set up a janky iGate at my parents’ house. Look, I never said I was going to be a prolific operator. Anyway, I just renewed my FCC license for the first time. The process wasn’t hard exactly, but it was incredibly stupid. You’d think by 2024 the FCC would have figured out how to make a website that doesn’t feel like it was designed by a committee in 1997 and then abandoned. You’d be wrong. ...

Remember the C.H.I.P.? That $9 Linux computer that was going to democratize computing? I had one laying around doing nothing, so naturally I turned it into an APRS iGate. Paired it with a hacked-apart SDR dongle (the antenna connector was… modified) and set the whole thing up near my parents’ house. It’s one of the only iGates for miles and miles out there, which says something about either my dedication to the hobby or the remoteness of my parents’ location. Probably both. ...

Upgraded from my crappy Baofeng to a Kenwood TH-D72A. This thing has automatic APRS beaconing built in. No more manually keying up packets on the trail like some kind of caveman. Took it out to Snow Lake this weekend for a test run. I had everything configured. Tested it at home. Ready to go. Obviously, I didn’t have everything configured. Halfway through the hike I noticed… nothing was transmitting. Great. Did some troubleshooting on the trail (as one does) and discovered that if I manually tuned to the APRS frequency, the radio would beacon just fine. But if I used a memory channel? Nothing. ...

Hiked the High Divide Trail in Olympic National Park. Brought my crappy Baofeng UV-5R and a rollup J-Pole antenna because apparently I can’t just go on a hike without turning it into a radio experiment. From Heart Lake, I sent out an APRS packet. Just a little “hey, I’m here, I’m alive, I’m sweaty” beacon into the void. When I got back to civilization and checked aprs.fi, I discovered the transmission was picked up in Canada. ...

My name is Dustin Brewer and I got my Amateur Extra license on 2014-12-30. How did I end up here? Well, I was messing around with Arduinos and those cheap RF24L01+ radios, which naturally led to software-defined radio, which naturally led to tracking airplanes with ADS-B, which naturally led to… wait, why am I not licensed to do any of this properly? So I studied for a couple weeks. Found an exam nearby. Walked in and took all three tests in one sitting because I’m cheap and didn’t want to pay the test-taking fee multiple times. Technician, General, Extra - boom, boom, boom. ...