Welcome to the N3OX (formerly N3UMH) Radio Pages.

Updates and Other Noise

April 6, 2008

It's been a good week to work QRPers. I heard G3ROO's three watt vintage WWII transmitter on 80m CW and we made a QSO. There aren't a whole lot of situations in which I need to send a "449C" report, that was one of them! The next night I worked N0LX pedestrian mobile; he was running five watts into a homebrew 20 foot end fed antenna. Check out his website at www.n0lx.com. He's got some great portable antennas, and he's clearly put a lot of work into getting them to work *well* in the absence of a good counterpoise. Today, I was combing 10m for weak signals during a little opening and I came across YV1RDX/QRP calling CQ. QRP works ;-)

March 29, 2008

I have a lot of antennas. I always have a few up whenever I can and I'm often trying something new. Not everything is an improvement and they come down eventually. Some, like the magnetic loop I built are almost never used but were just built for comparison and experimentation. This has really worked out well for me. I always know that I've made some decent effort toward my station; I don't have the means for big towers and beams at 100', but I still have an antenna farm.

I do what I can because ham radio relies on two-way communication! A good station on one end can do the heavy lifting in a QSO; can work small stations with severely compromised antennas. This is what makes every single all-band wonder wire a great antenna, the fact that there's always going to be someone to work who's running a big antenna up high and a kilowatt. I don't want to rely on other stations to hear my peanut whistle station forever. I still skirt the edges of what's possible because it's fun. What moron runs 100W on 160m to work DX? I do and I've worked 91 countries to date largely by the efforts of big stations with good RX capability. But I work on it, I try to improve my station.

There are a lot of people that put up one antenna, one Extra Special G5RV by WZ3XZL or whatever, and give it a 5/5 review on eHam.net because it "works". I'd encourage new hams to resist that temptation... to figure your *only* antenna works well because you can make contacts on all the HF bands with it. Trust me, you have no idea what you're missing and just throwing up a simple dipole or full wave loop for some band might be all you need to get 10dB better performance on some band! Almost everyone who has the room for a single multiband wire antenna also has the room for a couple more. Put some more up, check performance out yourself, do some optimizing. Ham radio will be better off for it.

January 6, 2008

Still active, rarely updating the front page I guess! The experiment is in high gear so I'm pretty busy with that but I have been working a bit on improving my flag antenna for 160m.

But, this is why I really wanted to post: Vacuum tube fabricated largely by hand! What an amazing video.

I've been doing some PSK on 30m. The guys over at the 30m PSK group on Yahoo are trying to get on Thursday and Sunday nights to stir up activity, and I'm trying to support it... it's a great band and plenty of room for some digital ops. It will be nice to see if more DX get on board, but it seems there are some band plan considerations for the VK/ZL guys. Fair amount of DX to be had on 30m PSK31, it seems, and it's a good ragchew band for me after Jess goes to bed.

May 21, 2007

The Dual Band Moxon project page is up. It's been years since I had an HF beam up and it is a nice improvement. It's actually the best 17m antenna that I've ever had, so I'm looking forward to seeing how I do on 17. Unfortunately, the band is not quite as cooperative as 20m, which has been giving me good solid openings into the Pacific to test the antenna on. K6SGH over at the Moxon Antenna Project has mirrored my Moxon page over there. It'll be fun to see how many people end up trying this.

I think I'm going to cool off the HF antenna work for a while. My backyard can't take much more of this and I've got a pretty good antenna for 160m through 10m excluding 12m and 60m. Excluding 12m... uh-oh... I like 12m. OK, I don't promise to avoid building a 12m antenna, but I'm more or less done and intend to spend more time on the radio on the weekends instead of slinging wire and fiberglass.

April 23, 2007

I updated the "Shack" section with pictures of the latest mess. I still need to make a page for the rotatable flag I built, but that will come later. News since December... I worked N8S and VU7RG for all time new ones. I added 10m traps to the 15m dipole in preparation for the coming Sporadic E season and the Techs that will be on the air, so now the only band I'm still missing is 12m. I'm still fighting line noise; I'm going to pursue it a little more now that there's more activity on the higher bands. The line noise isn't a big deal on the atmospherically noisy 30m and down, but on 20m and up it's pretty harsh. Pepco came out long ago and made some good improvements but I think a few new sources have cropped up.

December 16, 2006

The FCC has dropped Morse testing, and I think they've made a smart decision. Once the new rules take effect, all Technician class operators, whether or not they've passed Element 1, will have General-level CW privileges on 80m, 40m, 15m, and 10m, and the usual Novice/Tech Plus 10m phone privileges. It seems to me that the FCC is on top of this thing... the entry level ham license now has meaningful HF privileges that require knowledge of Morse!

Mandatory Morse testing won't keep people who just want to take the General test and run phone from doing so. 75m phone has been expanded to accomodate those who just want to get on 75m and talk to their buddies. So I want to extend a welcome to HF CW to all the Technician class operators out there! Did you buy an IC-706 or an FT-857 because it had good V/UHF capability? If so, get ready: buy a key, stick up a 40m dipole and learn some CW and go DXing! You're going to automatically have major HF CW privileges when this thing takes effect.

About Me

I've held an amateur license since February, 1995, and upgraded to Amateur Extra in 1999. I got the vanity call N3OX in January, 2006. I've been more or less active the whole time I've been a ham. I've been somewhat more active lately now that I'm out of apartment status and into a house where I am permitted some antennas, but I'm leaving all the apartment-specific information up for the cliff-dwellers out there.

I'm working on my Ph.D. in Physics at University of Maryland, College Park. Given the sunspot situation, ham radio has been supplanted somewhat by my other hobby, songwriting, but I'm trying to keep the experimenter's spirit alive and get a signal out there.

Thanks for visiting, hope you find the pages useful and interesting.