Ben’s Blog

Yesterday was an interesting day. My parents came up Friday night and spent the night. The primary purpose was for my dad to help me put up a ham radio antenna. We were mostly successful. I’ll elaborate in a future post.

Our antenna project was interrupted early on to take Cassie to the emergency room. She was sterilizing some pacifiers with boiling water, and when she took the pot off the stove the handle broke. She now has decent sized second degree burns on her stomach and left leg. They gave her a tetanus shot to prevent infection, some high-powered pain medicine, and some cream to put on the burn. She’s handling it very well. I would definitely take advantage of the situation more than she has. Lucky for me, she isn’t.

On any normal day Luke would have been right beside Cassie. Thankfully, yesterday wasn’t a normal day, and he was in the other room with my mom. Interestingly, one of my high school classmates was Cassie’s nurse in the ER. There were only 56 of us, and Belmont is over 100 miles from Oxford. I’d say the odds are low.

Yesterday afternoon Cassie was feeling well enough to go to the Southern Living Idea House in Taylor. My mom has been reading Southern Living for as long as I can remember, and she and my dad are planning to renovate their house next year. It was pretty interesting.

Luke and I went up to the special event station last night. Our primary purpose was to help my friend from Belmont, Randy, KE5RXN, make contact with us. He had been trying all week with no luck.

When we arrived they had a nice pileup going on 20 meters. I called Randy and told him what frequency we were on. He could hear all the stations calling us, but couldn’t hear us. That most likely meant he was in our skip zone. Later, after the 20m band died, we moved to the 40m band. I called Randy again, but he still couldn’t hear us. We never got a chance to try the 80 meter band, but I expect it would have worked, as the size of the skip zone decreases with frequency. While I was there they made contact with a station on Martha’s Vineyard, and a station near Aspen, Colorado, operating with less than five watts, among others.

Today I operated the special event station during the late afternoon. When I arrived things were slow, so I switched over to 80m and Randy and I made contact without a problem. Things remained slow the remainder of my shift. My signal was getting out just fine, as the station I talked to in Manitoba, Canada, could hear me well. Maybe most everyone was still at work?

Yesterday I helped some other members of UMARC and Anderson Communications install a new 70cm repeater on top of Baptist Memorial Hospital-North Mississippi here in Oxford. We put the repeater hardware in the rack, ran the coax (LMR600), and installed the antenna on the roof. It’s now up and running. The output frequency is 444.350 MHz with a split of 5MHz+ and a tone of 107.2 Hz.

The new repeater will supplement our existing 2m repeater on 147.33 MHz. The club also recently installed an APRS digipeater on top of Bishop Hall on campus.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any 70cm capable transceivers currently. I can listen on my scanner, but that’s it. Hopefully I can remedy that by the end of the year.

Anderson Communications' "tower jocks" carry the antenna to the top of the tower.

Continue reading for more photos of the antenna install and a propogation map.

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The University of Mississippi Amateur Radio Club (UMARC), of which I am a member, is having a special event station this week to commemorate the Presidential debate being held on campus Friday. The special event station runs yesterday through Friday. All contacts get a QSL card, no SASE required. You can get more information here.

I operated some this morning, and will operate again Friday afternoon from 3-5pm. This morning I made contacts with stations in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Cuba, among others, primarily on the 20m band.

Unfortunately I don’t have an HF radio yet, so I can’t make contact with them myself.

Hurricane Gustav came ashore southwest of New Orleans this morning. So far, parts of Louisiana and Mississippi are seeing a little flooding, but nothing too bad yet. The storm is tracking into western Louisiana and eastern Texas.

Yesterday I got a call from a fellow amateur radio guy here in Oxford. The St. Helena Parrish Emergency Operations Center in Greensburg, LA was looking for some hams to deploy down there for the storm and its aftermath. Unfortunately I had to decline because of Liam. It would have been fun.

Back in the summer of 2002, the summer Cassie and I got married, I picked up a book on ham radio at Radio Shack while we were on vacation in St. Louis. I read the book and could have easily passed the first exam. However, I wanted to wait until I had learned Morse code so I could get the Morse code test (5 wpm) and the first written test out of the way at the same test session. That would have given me the Technician Plus license. I never learned Morse code well enough, so I never took the test.

Fast forward to the fall of 2007. In the mean time the FCC has completely done away with the Morse code requirement for all three licenses (Technician, General, and Extra class). I passed my Technician exam in October, my General in March, and finally my Extra in June. My original call sign was KE5RDQ, but after I upgraded to Extra class I applied for and received WF5N. (Only Extra class hams can hold four “digit” call signs.)

My main interest in becoming a ham was to learn more about electrical engineering and that sort of thing. Ham radio is a pretty broad hobby, and I haven’t been able to investigate even a portion of it yet. Some of the areas I’d like to explore are: Morse code, satellites, digital modes, VHF+ SSB and CW, and homebrewing equipment.

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