One of the main reasons that I got into Amateur Radio way back when, was that I liked the idea of building things. In the late ’70′s, that meant electronics. I still remember seeing an issue of Popular Science or Mechanics, I don’t remember which one, that had plans to build a phone answering machine. That was back before our consumer electronics crazed society where you can go to the local Walmart and pick one up for $20.00 bucks or less.

I was 12 or 13 and didn’t have the skills or money to build it, but it fascinated me. A couple of years later, I found Amateur Radio and that ended up leading me to computers and the rest is history. So fast forward to today. We have had a couple of decades of the US making money on money (the financial industry) and we have sold off (out) the manufacturing and engineering base of the country. To be honest with you, I have been looking at this and have become pretty pessimistic about our future.

Then I start researching on the Internet (something we haven’t completely sold out) and I come a-crossed Arduino. This is what I remember the US being when I was a kid. People building and experimenting with stuff in their garages and basements.

There are all kinds of things we can do with these things. Not to mention their applications in Amateur Radio. So I bought a board on ebay, and I plan to start playing with it. It combines my interest in programming and electronics. I have a couple of ideas for things I want to try and make, so let’s see what happens!

This is the kind of stuff that will turn the fortunes of the country around. If we want jobs, we need to nurture out entrepreneurial spirit in this country again, and not export the manufacturing of them off shore.

America is one of the most dynamic and ever changing experiments that has ever taken place in our known universe.

I don’t think I am going out too much on a limb making that statement. In these fast changing times, I think that only the United States of America has the ability to make the changes necessary to retain it’s top spot, politically, economically and morally.

We have a system that is flexible to adapt to current conditions, we just have to exercise it. Let’s face it, over the last 20 years, we have sold our manufacturing sole to the bad guys. Some how we thought just coming up with the ideas and making money off of them was all we needed to do. Now we find out we are not the only ones with ideas and the bad guys don’t depend on us anymore.

We are kind of funny in that sometimes we operate on the extremes and not in any sort of balanced manner. In our current cycle we seem to be heading from what I would call Brute-Force Capitalism to Socialism. Brute Force Capitalism is when all we care about is the current quarters results no matter what the results will be for the future.

In racing for the profits and not thinking about the future, we have painted ourselves into a corner. We don’t have a manufacturing sector to work our way out of this recession and the other parts of the economy depend on it (ie service, banking, etc.) So what do we do?

Read this article by Andy Grove the retired CEO of Intel and let me know what you think: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_28/b4186048358596.htm

I am born and raised in Nebraska.  I haven’t figured out exactly how the connection forms for some people to a particular geographic area, be it genes, up-bringing or whatever, but I have always felt attached to this area.

I admire it’s people for being hard working and self motivated.  Most people around here would rather “do it themselves” than let the government do it for them.  Yet they will drop everything to help a neighbor in trouble.  Maybe that is why I enjoy Amateur Radio so much.  Our community shares many of those traits.  We like to do it ourselves, and to help others learn to do it also.

It hasn’t always been easy.  Urbanization has taken it’s toll on the Great Plains and sometimes our “work ethic” has been misconstrued as being patsies.  I think the tide may be turning.  I came a-crossed an article on Newsweek about how the Great Plains are weathering the Great Recession.  You can read it here: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/02/the-great-great-plains.html.

I know it’s a stretch, but it does kind of parallel the plight of Amateur Radio.

Got side tracked once again and haven’t posted anything for a month.

To finish what I learned from the 070 Podex three day weekend, I will tell you what I did on memorial day.  I had been running a 100′ windom that worked reasonably well, but I couldn’t tune 15 meters and 40/80 was kind of iffy.

So on memorial day I enlisted the help of my two sons and we added another 120′ of wire to the windom and made a 220′ loop out of it.  It goes ac-crossed the top of the house and then to the back of the lot between two trees and forms a rectangle.

Now I can tune 80-6 meters with no problem and I can even use my Heathkit SB-200 without getting so much rfi into the house that is shuts off the LCD TV.  I have made a lot of contacts with it and have had good reports every time.

Like all Amateurs, I ran into a problem with RFI in the shack.  I have a 100′ Windom setup that is feed with dual RG6 coax that goes into a MFJ-962D antenna tunner.

For the most part the setup works pretty good.  I have never been able to tune 15m or 160m, but I could the rest of the bands.  I always got a little RFI on 40m, but not so much that I couldn’t work it.

Well something changed over the winter.  I don’t know if it has anything to do with the antenna, or the ham shack.  I just got done rack mounting my main rigs and I suppose that may have changed something.  When I ran psk on 40m and 80m, I would get RFI and the rig would pulsate output so bad it was unusable.

So this weekend, I tried a trick that Woody KCØWA told me about.  I took a 1000pf ceramic capacitor and soldered it from the shielding to the center conductor of an old piece of RG-8 that Gary NØSJM gave me on BOTH ends.  Then I connected one end to the ground in the shack and the other end to the ground rod just outside the shack.

It worked for the most part.  The plusing is gone and I can work 80m again.  On 40m, the pulsing is gone, but I still can’t eliminate the ALC when I try to run PSK.

So I am going to try one other thing over the memorial day weekend.  Then maybe I can be conpetative when the next contest rolls around.

Just got done participating in my first contest.  At least the first one that I made a real effort to participate in.  Not sure how well I did, but I did try.

I learned a few things along the way that I will share with you for better or worse the next few days.

First, logging.  From the 070 page I followed the link and downloaded GenLog from W3KM at http://www.qsl.net/w3km/gen_log.htm.  Pretty neat program.  It took me about 10 minutes to figure it out and get started.  I have to say that I am impressed at how he updates it for all of the contests.  I logged the contest and then uploaded the ADIF file to the KJ4IZW  Scoring Tool http://dwestbrook.net/projects/ham/scorer/ to create the file that I emailed in.  Then I imported the ADIF file to hrd and eqsl.  Worked well.

I learned a couple of things about my antenna setup also.  I will share with you what I did to fix the problems as I go along this week.

Been busy lately doing a web redesign on the Amateur Radio Association of Nebraska’a web site.  If you are interested, take a look at http://w0wwv.org.

I think it turned out pretty good.  Now on to getting ready for this years field day.

I have been looking for a way to record events at our association meetings and while working on projects.  I finally found what I was looking for.  I recently purchased a Creative Labs VADO HD 3G Pocket Video Recorder.

Creative labs description:

“See it, shoot it, and share it–all in high definition. Creative Lab’s third generation Vado HD Pocket Video Camera (Black) makes it easier than ever to record outstanding video in 720p high-definition quality. Featuring a new, ultra-stylish design, the Vado HD is slim enough to fit in your pocket, yet its 4 GB memory capacity holds up to 120 minutes of widescreen HD-quality video. With instant one-touch recording and included Vado Central 3.0 software, you’ll be watching, sharing, and editing outstanding video with ease.”

So far so good.  I have taken several videos for this blog and ARAN’s website at http://w0wwv.org and am learning to edit them with Microsoft’s Movie Maker software.  The HD camera included is an added bonus.  I have been using it to document my projects and it works a lot better than my Droids camera.

We had our April Member Meeting on Wednesday, and since we have been busy doing repeater upgrades, we ran short on time to come up with a presentation.  So I volunteered to show them what the Sienna was all about.  I am sure they are getting tired of me talking about it, but they were kind enough not to say anything.

We taped the presentation and for what it is worth, you can view it at http://w0wwv.org/index.php/topic,273.0.html

Let’s face it, like or not the majority of us depend on our computers in Amateur Radio.  From controlling our Rigs, to logging, to DSP, we couldn’t do a lot of the neat things we do without them.

So if you are using a computer and it is connected to the Internet, we have to deal with Viruses or Malware.  The majority of the infections we see these days are the malware kind.  I am not sure why the distinction was made, but Malware is usually someting that infects your computer when you visit a web page.  We used to joke that if a computer came in with malware on it, the user was visiting too many sites of the kind that they didn’t want there spouse to know about.  We can’t say that anymore.  A lot of the malware we have seen the last 6 months, has come from visiting legit sites.  The web sites are accepting ads from nefarious business people without realizing it.  These ads contain the malware.

So what is the Amateur Radio operator to do to protect his or her computer.  We all know that most of us are working on a tight budget.  We have tried many of the free anti-virus software available and they all seem to work to some degree.  Lately, we have been using Microsoft’s Security Essentials http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/.

It is free for personal use, and seems to work well.  It also appears to have less of an effect on the performance of your PC.

If we could just get these people to write good legitimate code for Amateur Radio use instead of this stuff, we wouldn’t need Anti-Virus software.  Until then, you need to be vigilant and keep your Anti-Virus updates current and your OS updates current also.