Got this email recently -

Dear Robert,

Your membership in Radio Amateurs of Canada will expire on 2012-09-08.  We look forward to having you join us for another year.  You can go to http://www.rac.ca/en/members/myprofile/renew/ to renew your membership now and avoid receiving further notices.

If you would prefer to renew by telephone please call the RAC office at 877-273-8304.  If you prefer to send a cheque we will be sending you a form in the mail in approximately a month with the correct amount.

Radio Amateurs of Canada

Ok, no mention of the cost/benefits.. Seems the only benefit to renewing is avoidance of further notifications. Stop it, you’re over-motivating me and flooding me with information. In fact, the way to find out what the cost of renewal, is to click through and stop just before the payment screen, and you find out it’s $54.

What do I get for that $54? What did it get me last year?

I got a nice certificate saying I was a member. And 6 issues of “The Canadian Amateur”, which in all honesty I find to be a good magazine and a fun read, even if it’s been a little light sometimes.

Somehow, I was expecting more from RAC. I’m not sure what I was expecting to be honest, after all, I am a new ham, but I find I get much more out of sites like eham or QRZ than I do from RAC. I also joined RAQI last year (the Quebec provincial club), and I get more out of that then my RAC investment.

So what’s a 2nd year Canadian Ham to do? I don’t see a return on my membership dollar. I won’t bash RAC, I’m sure they are nice folks with good intentions, and I may come back at some point. If they offered a magazine-only subscription for a more reasonable price I’d look into it, but $54 didn’t get me much this year.

For year 2 of my Ham-life though, I think I’ll try an ARRL membership,

oh yeah, I have a radio blog.. I should put stuff here..

Family and travel commitments this year mean that I was pretty much unable to do much of anything to do with field day my first year as a ham.  That was rather disappointing, I was looking forward to finding people to connect with and maybe learn a thing or two..

So I’ve been spending what time I can find on putting together a field set up with my FT-897 and such.. I’ve got power, and several untested antenna attempts put together.. now I just need to find a park or field (oh, and some spare time!) where I can go and play with this stuff..

This is where having a local club that’s not into HF is a pain… These would be fun things to try with other hams… at least until I start enjoying the finer points of discussing aged and aching body parts on VHF.  Oh well, at least there’s youtube so I can learn from others’ experience…

A few things I do keep track of to keep the radio passion going -

• /r/amateurradio on reddit
• The HamNation show on twit.tv
• Amateur Logic.tv
• a few other forums, most of which i just lurk on for now

there’s also an active ham community on Google Plus, I’ve learned some interesting things there..

So the goal before summer ends is to go off the grid and make some QSOs from a field with a wire hanging off a tree or something. Now that I’ve written it down, I’m committed to it

A few posts ago, I promised you a look at the shack. This may be the first of many views, as I realize that the setup is never quite what I want it to be, and will evolve over time…..

It’s tucked away in the corner of the garage, between my workbench and a freezer… Not super comfortable, but fits well with the “man cave” motif….

Here’s how it looks right now

Working clockwise from 12:00, there’s an LG monitor which is connected to the netbook underneath. I tend to use the netbook’s display for the main Ham Radio Deluxe screen, and use the bigger screen on top for web browsing, the log book, and the digital modes screen. Two dollar-store digital clocks show me local time and GMT.

On the right of the screen, is a Kenwood TS-140S, which was my first HF rig. A rather capable old timer that was my main rig for a short period of time. It now plays a backup role, and I may part with it to fund the acquisition of other goodies.

On top of the Kenwood, is the MFJ-993B antenna tuner. Besides tuning, it also lets me flip between my half sloper (for 80m-15m) and my Antron 99 (for 12m-10m).

On top of that is an Autek Research QF-1A SSB/CW/AM filter. This was a throw in when I bought the Kenwood, and now I use it pretty much all the time. A tweakable audio filter with adjustable notch and lowpass.. it does a great job of helping to pick weak audio from the noise.

Under the Kenwood is the MC-80 microphone, the netbook, then an older Pyramid power supply.

Last but not least is my Yaesu FT-897D, with a home-made analog meter on top. I wasn’t planning on buying a 2nd rig so soon, but an unexpected trip to sales-tax -free Delaware, USA combined with a strong Canadian dollar kind of nudged things along. Also, I wanted VHF/UHF, and realized this all-in-one unit would fit my needs. I’m a big fan of this radio, and haven’t regretted the purchase at all.

Not visible are the coax switch to let me flip the antennas between the radios, and a RigBlaster interface for the digital modes.

Next time, we’ll take a look at that home-made meter, and how a few bucks and some parts from the junk box made for a nice addition to the shack.

Got this in the mail today!

I was lucky in that my first QSO was with a ham who actually wanted to chat more than just exchange  signal reports. We had a nice conversation and he submitted for ARRL recognition of my “first contact” – a nice gesture he didn’t have to do.

It was a great way to be welcomed into the hobby. Thanks K1EKF!

I’ll go into sharing what I’ve set up so far for a shack in a bit..

Other than some antenna/transmitter tests with a local friend who’s also into amateur radio, I’ve yet to contact people using my rig.

When joining any new community, I feel it’s important to observe and understand what’s going on before barging in and bothering the people that were here before me. I’ve seen far too many examples online and off of people who come in and don’t understand why they’re angering the locals, I want to try and not be the cause of that myself.

Some new hams admit to being shy the first times, and while I can’t discount  that entirely for me, it’s really about learning and getting used to the speech patterns unique to this medium. I’ve no problem having many people hear my voice, but I want to be sure I can “talk the talk” when I get on.

There’s lots to learn even at this early stage, being a listener gives me a chance to learn how to use the gear, the antennas, the tuner, all the twiddly-bits. I’m seeing how different bands propagate, and the types of activity on the different frequencies.

It’s also a great chance to see how people behave on the different bands. I was surprised to find that different types of people hang out on different frequencies. Some of them sound very formal, whereas some others almost sound like CB radio, and others still sound like shouldn’t be there at all   It’ll be interesting to see where I choose to spend my time.

So for now, it’s listening – soon, “joining the conversation”

” … a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.” – Aldo Leopold

 

I’ve always loved and been drawn to radio. I remember being quite young when my dad showed me how at night you could hear AM stations from far away places.

There was magic in the air – listening to WKBW from Buffalo or WABC from New York, they sounded HUGE in my bedroom here in Quebec.. These were the days before cable TV,  here were these big bold authoritative American stations, beaming tunes and DJ-patter at us with such power and energy, yet by dawn, they were gone.

It was literally a portal to another world opening up each night at sunset. I was hooked. Who knew what the magic would bring that night? Baseball games from Boston or St-Louis, tunes from New York or Chicago,  traffic reports for roads I’d never seen. It seemed like there was no end to it.  To this day I still listen for distant stations at night – though many stations sound alike now, the offerings are no where near as exciting as they once were.

One day, my dad showed me another radio in the house, with the strange “SW” (shortwave) band. Here was the whole world! Strange languages, accents, cold-war propaganda, jamming, stations that broadcast nothing but numbers! More magic!!

As I grew,  my passion for radio started to include wanting to understand the technology behind it. I learned about waves and electronics as I built transmitter kits that let me BE a radio station, even if the range was only about 100 feet.

In my late 20′s, my father passed away, and I took some time to reboot. I discovered an old 1940′s radio at a market, and was hooked into antique radio repair/restoration. I’d discovered a new way to feed my radio addiction.

My journey into podcasting is directly related to my love for radio. Here was a transmitter-less, legal way to be radio. Since I had never worked in radio professionally, this was my opportunity to learn some of the craft behind producing radio-like content.

So here we are in 2011, and I’ve found yet another outlet for my radio passion. I’ve studied for and passed my amateur radio certification, and obtained my own call sign:  VE2PDT. Now radio becomes a two-way communication device, and instead of just listening to the world, I’ll be able to interact as well.

Some of you may be thinking, “Dude, you can interact with the world here. It’s 2011 and called email/social networks/cell phones” .. Yes, that’s true, but none of these feed my passion for radio. Also, I still think it’s cool that I can converse with someone in Europe without there being any 3rd party between us. No telecoms, no Apple, no nothing – Just air. There’s magic in that air.

I’ll be blogging about my amateur radio adventures here, as I build out and use my “radio shack” and hopefully sharing useful information along the way.

CQ CQ CQ…