november two november lima yankee

Recognition

…was the theme of tonight’s ARES/RACES meeting.

Incidentally, I’m now a recognized member of ARES, but the RACES paperwork is pending review.

HT memories

It has been an unexpectedly nostalgic experience to overwrite all the New York City repeater and tactical frequencies in my HT’s memory, which have been there for years, with local ones.

For one thing, it’s a sacrifice in some sense. The slots were arranged ideally for convenient usage—the most-frequented repeaters placed for easy access and scanning, the less-used and more obscure machines at an arm’s length (or two). With a few exceptions, I have little sense of which frequencies will be the most useful around here, which machines I’ll be able to hit from where, which ones I might rather steer clear of. These are things that take some time to figure out, and while my radios are sure to get reprogrammed at least a few times as I learn the spread, there was a lot of intelligence in the old programming, now disappeared.

Reviewing the old programs was also a reminder of some of the hilarious, ridiculous banter that’s commonplace on some of New York’s outer-borough machines, where I would lurk for laughs from time to time. There are a few familiar callsigns I won’t be likely to hear again soon. And I’ll miss the elaborately conceived network of repeaters used by New York ARES.

Something I’ve noticed, only peripherally related: 440 was king in the steel and concrete canyons of the urban landscape. I’m not sure how much that was due to conscious decisions regarding the permeation and noise floor advantages of 70-cm propagation, or if it was just a preference of the local culture—I suspect the former but did have more, and sometimes debilitating, intermod difficulties operating on 440, amid all the RF noise New York serves up—but 2 meters does seem to dominate here, as I think it does in most places. There are a bunch of 440 machines, though, and I’ll be listening for activity on both bands.

Funny to think that programming a walkie-talkie could be a bittersweet task, but it was a good exercise, too. I hadn’t messed with my unit (an Icom IC-W32A) in a few months, and the keystrokes had gotten a bit rusty in my muscle-memory. Some of the button markings are rubbed off on that radio, too, so it took a few minutes to figure it all out again.

Next step, as far as VHF/UHF goes, is to get a base antenna in the air above my place and bust out the Kenwood base/mobile radio. That rig might have a mic-jack issue to contend with, but I’ll handle that when I come to it.

Unpacking

I started unpacking my station components last night, and this morning dropped my main HF rig off at my brother’s house for future maintenance. I bought that radio at the Mt. Beacon hamfest in upstate New York in 2006, right after I was first licensed, but it has never really worked properly. I was able to receive strong CW signals on it, but there seemed to be something wrong with the sideband filters, and trying to tune or transmit with any power out seemed to cause problems. Since I was living in Brooklyn, though, under difficult station-building conditions, there was never a lot of impetus (or space) to open the thing up and work on it. Without a way to hang an antenna in the air, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to use it once it worked.

Now that I’m in an area much more conducive to antenna growing and station building, an HF rig will come in a lot handier—once I’ve fixed the darn thing. Last week Steve and I picked up copies of the technical manuals for our rigs (he’s got the -767 model) that were on clearance at the local GigaParts, and we’re hoping to get together in the next several days to open the radios up and spread their innards across his kitchen table. He has a new encoder to install in his (the frequency knob has been getting increasingly flaky—also a common failure mode in these rigs), and I’ll just try to figure out what needs to be done to mine.

It’s a good time for that; all that studying for the Extra exam means electronics theory and good engineering practice are much fresher in my head than they were just a few weeks ago.

DE N2NLY/AE

Passed my Extra exam this morning, so I thought I’d celebrate with a new blog. Check here for details about my new Alabama station, informal coverage of amateur activity that interests or involves me, thoughts, giggles, and whatever else pops out. Enjoy, and 73.