home
After some poking around I decided to see if I can put a new face to the site with a new theme. What you are looking at so far is what I found most pleasing to my eye.
Side benefit to this one is that it also shows my @kf5jra twiiter feed.
If you find anything broken please let me know.
With me just turning half a century old (50) I made my life easier at the desk of my ham station.
I have always eyed my dad's (N6XT) Green Heron RT-21 so I have been on the look out for one to be had for quite some time. So a little over a week before my birthday I spotted a RT-21D posted on swap.qth.com that was almost half the cost of a new unit. Like any good ham operator I did my due diligence to verify the seller was legit. Everything was on the up and up and I became the proud owner of the RT-21D.
A simple reconfiguration of the controller (original owner was using it with a Yaesu rotor) to work with my Ham-IV, hooking up the pigtail and I was in business. Added the rotor configuration to both DXLab's DXView and to N1MM+'s rotor application without issue (both authors have awesome documentation on their websites. Quick test with both to ensure everything was optimal and working properly and I was in business.
Now I have both hands free to work contacts and no longer require holing my arm to move my antenna. A big thanks go out to:
- My dad (N6XT) for the assistance
- Jeff over at Green Heron Engineering for answering all my questions and dealing with my impatience.
Hope to see you down the log.
73 de KF5JRA
Ron
I have finally stepped into the current age of ham radio (as far as the rig goes). On Friday (04/15/2016) I signed for my IC-7300 that was properly handled by the UPS guy. The radio is not much bigger than my IC-735 but the performance is ten fold over my old radio.
Operating the radio standalone (with out a computer) has been a blast and a joy to operate. The MFJ-939 tuner is now on the shelf since I have a LDG tuner that now handles the tuning of my carolina windom (IC-7300's internal tuner can not get a good match). Also the signalink is also on the shelf. Pretty much everything is on the shelf except the icom external speaker. Contemplating on ordering the control cable for the tuner so I can do it in one step instead of three.
With having such a new radio with different technology than its predecessors I am excreting patience in waiting for the mac ham radio software developers to add full support for the radio. (You know the old saying, "Good things come to people who wait") I have reached out to the developers of the software I use and have expressed my extreme interest in them adding full support for the ic-7300. I even went as far as e-mailing them the CI-V command section from the full manual.
Online social support has been awesome both in the IC-7300 Facebook group as well as the IC7300 yahoo group. Every day I am learning something new (positive) about the radio as I try new things to try and get my current version of software to work.
Cya on the bands (and hopefully in my log)
--
73 de KF5JRA
Ron
This blog post is being posted after the fact but backdated in hopes to provide a better flow as I feel in the gaps of things I like to write about that has been done to our home here in Colorado.
With being all moved in it was time to make our new home our own and the first task at hand was to clean-up the property All the work was accomplished by my family (Kelly, Kyle, Ian, and Sam) and my next door neighbor to the north of us (Jay). Believe it or not most of the listed work below was mostly completed before our first winter here in Colorado.
Back Yard
-
Removed all discarded items left from previous owner.
-
Graded and smoothed out garden area.
-
Filled in DiY created root cellar on north-east corner of the house.
-
Relocated chicken coop (Re-purposed as a tool shed).
- Cleaned chicken coop.
- Repaired floors and holes in chicken coop.
- Painted chicken coop to match future colors of planned house trim.
-
Ripped out the sorry excuse of a fence on the north side of the property and replace.
Front Yard
- Removed un-maintained shrubbery between the half circle and the street.
- Removed un-maintained shrubbery along south side of driveway attached to main garage.
- Removed a pin tree that should have never been planted so closely between two trees.
- Laid crushed asphalt on long driveway located on the south side of the property that heads back to the shop (man cave, ham shack, work area). Future Post coming soon.
- Laid crushed asphalt in half circle driveway
Below is a Google Earth picture that pretty closely matches what we started with when we moved in May 2013.
Below is a Google Earth picture of what it looks like as of August 2015.
