Listen to the bands and see how even the extra's don't use that portion anyway.
Ha ha ha. This Extra currently doesn't use ANY of the bands because of the wee antenna problem.
The only reason I tested for General and Extra was because I passed Technician first. I think I would have been happy working 2m and up versus long-wave. There are a bunch of repeaters in Dayton sharing space on very tall commercial radio and television towers. D Star and other digital modes abound. A ham friend who introduced me to the hobby many years ago (way before I obtained my Novice ticket) had "only" a Technician license, but he seemed to enjoy those bands as much as or more than anyone with a General license, especially portable and mobile operations from his car. My first "ham adventure" was participating in a Fox Hunt with a home-brew Yagi, hand-held out the passenger side window while he drove the car! Back then I couldn't afford a radio, much less an amateur radio station, but he and the DARA Hamvention got me "hooked" on ham radio.
The VE asked me if I wanted to try the General exam, after he had graded and said I had passed the Technician exam. So I said, "Sure, bring it on!" DARA sponsors free VE testing under the auspices of the
Laurel VEC; there is no fee for testing, nor any fee for same-day re-testing if y
ou fail. So, why not give it a try, I sez?
Some time later I handed in my exam answers, and soon after that the VE came back again and said I had passed the General exam. He then asked if wanted to try for the Extra exam. So I said yes to that too. And, amazingly, I passed that one with only two wrong answers! Not bad for "multiple guess" questions, huh? Of course ALL the questions, as well as the answers, from which the test questions are randomly selected from a pool, are published on the Internet by the FCC. That's like shooting fish in a barrel IMHO!
Bear in mind that several weeks (maybe a month) before that, I had signed up with
hamtestonline.com and had purchased first the General, and later the Extra, tutorial packages after trying them out for free. Not having to bone up on Morse Code was a blessing... I've forgotten most of the symbols and pro-signs as well as most of the alphabet, and still find myself counting dits and dahs to decipher numbers. Pretty sad, really, 'cause I am SURE I coulda passed the General 13 wpm code test in 1967, and pretty sure I coulda aced the written exam back then too. Of course I wasn't eligible back then to test for the Advanced, much less the Extra class licenses. But not testing for ANYTHING, and having my Novice license EXPIRE without opportunity for renewal simply meant that I was OFF THE AIR from 1967 to 2013, forty-something years.
Not every ham that is a member of DARA (Dayton Amateur Radio Association) was pleased when I was awarded a "coveted" Extra Class License without undergoing (as apparently they did) the full Monty of blood, sweat, tears, and a zillion hours of on-the-air CW contacts using a home-brew crystal-set receiver with a 6L6 final in their home-brew transmitter. In other words, it wasn't "fair" that the FCC changed the game, and the rules of how the game is played, just to help revive a hobby and a public service that was slowly dying from the competition of CB radio, cell phones, the Internet and the general dumbing down of the population. Heck, I completely lost interest in radio, once I had an opportunity to earn real money using advanced electronics and other toys.
Not sure why I wanted to become a ham again, except I had the time and the money to do so and it was getting a little late in life. Sort of a now-or-never decision point. Getting the Extra ticket was just icing on the cake. Maybe if I had a few acres for an antenna farm, a full-gallon of transmitter power, and wanted to punch through the QRM like the "big naughty boys" I could use the extra bandwidth to advantage. And it IS nice to have a AC8NS call instead of K8UTJ, which is what I would probably have been awarded to replace my KN8UTJ Novice call sign if I had tested out for a Technician or General license in 1967 of 1968. Ah, well, the road less traveled... Qualified for the Quarter Century Wireless Association (QWCA) with that Novice license... they changed their rules, too, dropping the requirement to be "continuously licensed" for twenty-five years. Sort of like what the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars did, requiring only that you served, instead of being assigned to a combat or war zone.
Hey, What a trip to see all these guys that come up on QRZ featured ops that have all the gear in the world.. I am not coveting here but sure would be nice if some of them were willing to permanently share hi hi
I used to drool over
and covet anyone who could afford a Collins rig, but I got over it. My Heathkit SB-300 kit receiver had "gud enuf" sensitivity and selectivity, especially when using the optional CW crystal filter with my 80m dipole and its Teflon-insulated coaxial cable feed.
The KX3 was my own personal reward to celebrate getting re-licensed. Yeah, I know, selfish of me to do that. Of course now I covet and lust after Elecraft's K3S 100 watt Transceiver with all the trimmin's, including the P3 Panadapter and the 1500 watt KPA1500 linear amplifier. Next time someone hands me twelve thousand bux and sez "Go play!" I will be on the phone with Elecraft ordering a new rig. Or maybe I could put that money toward a tilt-over, crank-up, fifty-foot tower with a really spiffy, multi-band, beam antenna like the
steppIR that DARA has on one of their three towers. Hmmm. Maybe DARA would "allow me" to install a K3S rig in their clubhouse, with remote control from Venice, FL, to connect to their steppIR HF beam antenna... they allow out-of-state memberships. On second thought, make that a gift to me for twenty-five big ones to cover transportation and installation costs. Or maybe add a dozen or so mil so I can purchase a few acres of property here and build from scratch. But I guess I actually have to purchase a Powerball ticket to have a chance at that...
Seriously, I have read a lot of articles lately on software defined radios (SDRs) and most of them appear to be affordable, even for po' folks like me, retired on a fixed income and at the mercy of Congress and Uncle Sam. We're not talking about several throusand bux for a Flex radio or an Elecraft, just a few hundred to build an SDR rig... like in the good ol' days with vacuum tubes. I really like the idea of using the latest
affordable technology to communicate with stations "below the noise floor" that inhibited advances in analog communications in the 20th century.
When both stations have the benefit of atomic-clock frequency stabilization and coherent modulation and detection, it only requires patience to recover a low-bandwidth signal deeply buried "in the mud". I realized the truth of this forty years ago while taking a communications course in college, but in the 1970s the technology was hardly up to the task unless you had some very deep pockets full of cash, like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California did to build telemetry for deep-spacecraft probes. Amazing engineering they did. Some of that stuff is still operational and still sending data back to the Mothership (Earth). Maybe AMSAT will eventually become involved, and help advance the state-of-the-art, if we ever figure out a way to get the amateur radio satellites out of near-earth orbit in order to play around in the solar system. Probably need some very reliable and efficient ion engines for that. Or maybe solar sails. Or a combination of both.
I am interested in programming PIC and I thought I came across a thread that indicated that you do that. If so, maybe you could steer me to some educational site to get me started. Seems like I have heard that there are at least two different languages for PIC.
I do PIC programming... in native assembly language, so far. There are free C compilers available for the Microchip development system (which is free to download and use), and a friend of mine here in Florida is becoming quite good at using C with the PIC processor line. You can also purchase third-party compilers, probably in other languages as well as C and C++ but these all add some overhead to the final code that gets downloaded and executed on the PIC. Banging on the bits with assembly code has always been attractive to me because it's about as close to the hardware as you can get. You can also buy into a simpler solution: the
PICAXE microcontroller.
There are very good
forums at the Microchip website that are gentle to beginners. I may have had an advantage when I began playing around with PICs a few years ago because I was programming Intel 8085 microprocessors in the 1970s through the 1990s, building embedded systems without any formal training... an "earn while you learn" approach to new technology... not to be confused with "fake it 'til you make it," which apparently is an Amway slogan.
There is a wealth of free material available online in the form of datasheets, application notes, and white papers. I highly recommend a "hands on" approach to learning how to use and program PICs. I would start with a simple 8-bit PIC in a dual in-line through-hole package (DIP) and breadboard some simple input/output circuits using push-button switches and LEDs. It is extremely important to read and understand the datasheet for each PIC because Microchip crams fifty pounds of functionality into a five pound bag with all their PICs.
There are plenty of people here on EP that can help you once you get started. You will need to purchase a
Microchip programming pod, PICKit 3 (about fifty bux through Mouser) and download the free Microchip MPLAB X Integrated Development Environment package for Microsoft Windows. DO NOT try to purchase an el-cheapo "PICkit 3" from an Asian vendor. DO NOT download MPLAB X from any website other than Microchip. You might get lucky, but many so-called "PICkit 3" pods are counterfeits and will not work reliably. And who knows what software from Asia contains? I purchased my pod and downloaded software directly from Microchip, but there are many authorized Microchip distributors, such as Allied Electronics and Mouser. It will cost you less than a hundred bux to get started, but spend wisely. I suggest getting at least a half dozen 8-bit microcontrollers to begin learning with. You can go on to bigger, better, more feature-rich versions later with very little additional cost. I started out with a PIC10F200T-I/OT but I believe this is now obsolete. Suggest you get PIC10(L)F320 or PIC10(L)F322 microcontrollers to learn with. These come in a 6-pin SOT-23 surface-mount package as well as in an 8-pin plastic DIP. The DIP is recommended for bread-boarding/prototyping.
If you jump right in and try to program one of the higher performance PICs before cutting your teeth on the simple ones, you may give up in frustration. Better to take baby steps and learn the Microchip design philosophy before diving into deeper waters. PM me in a private conversation if you want to, but we should discuss specific problems and solutions here in an open forum so others might benefit.
Hop
