The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • New Callsign: W9EAJ

    New Callsign: W9EAJ

    Upon upgrading my amateur radio license to General last month, I begin looking for a vanity callsign to replace my KE9BPH originally issued when I first got my Technician license. I know I hadn’t been at this radio thing very long, but I was continually fumbling when trying to clearly speak the callsign. Difficult to remember, difficult to speak, just didn’t care for it.

    I spent quite a bit of time on RadioQTH – Available Calls but did not find any I liked. Then I read the fine print and learned that just because it doesn’t return as an option does not mean it’s unavailable. If a callsign has never been used, it won’t show up in those results!

    And that’s when I stumbled upon what is now, as of January 17th, 2025, my new callsign – W9EAJ. Easier to remember, easier to say, and quicker for me to identity. Win win.

    73.

  • Ham Radio Observations

    It has now been a few months since my first interaction with ham radio. In that time I’ve: passed the Technician and General tests; purchased and learned how to program a pair of handsets; purchased and programmed a mobile UHF/VHF radio for my truck; added an antenna to the truck; and setup and used a pair of HF radios to get on the 10 meter band, making a dozen or so long distance contacts.

    It’s been fun and full of learning. Here are a few things, in no particular order, which come to mind from my experience thus far:

    • The wide variety of power/connectivty options is frustrating, particularly since there is nowhere local to buy this stuff.
    • Ditto with the numerous coax connections and adapters.
    • I’m terrible at copying callsigns. It’s as if, by default, my brain has a 3 character buffer which, by the end of the callsign I hear, has discarded the beginning. I’ve taken to pencil and paper to write down callsigns calling CQ – it often takes hearing it multiple times, between radio noise and accents, to get it correct.
    • Antennas are confusing, I need to learn more here.
    • I need to figure out a permanent antenna setup, the small vertical in my front yard is less than ideal.
    • NanoVNA is a great learning tool.
    • I’m appreciative of AnyTone products – they’re workable at a great price.
    • I need to get the aforementioned connectors, adapters, jumpers, tools, etc. organized.
    • The local hams are friendly and eager to help.
    • The patchwork of software and systems everyone relies on is reminiscent of early personal computing days, and the BBS scene. I was surprised by this, and it’s a little refreshing.
    • I need to settle on a logging system.
    • I’m still hesitant to key up on the local repeater in response to chatter.
    • Putting names to callsigns takes some time.

    So that’s what comes to mind as I sit here this evening. Maybe I’ll update the list if more things come up.

    Here’s to learning!

  • General Upgrade

    I passed my test for the Amateur Radio Technician license back in October. It took all of a few hours for me to get curious enough to dive deeper into the subject and start preparing for the General license.

    Not wanting to just memorize the test bank, I hit Amazon in search of good reference material.

    What I ended up purchasing was Radio Theory Handbook – Beginner to Advanced by Ron Bertrand.

    After reading this, I went through Hamstudy.org and began preparing in ernest for the General. The book gave me the background I was looking for and I recommend it for others looking for more thorough explanations of the fundamentals.

    Last night, December 26, 2024, via the Tennessee Valley Exam Team’s remote testing, I passed the General test and upgraded my license!

  • Small Cheese Slicer

    Here was a fun little project.

    Ana and I sometimes spend Friday evenings at a local microbrewery, Springfield Beer Company, while we wait for the kids to be done with swim practice. Since bringing you own food in is encouraged, and we’re typically pretty hungry at that time of day, we often will pick up some cheese and charcuterie meats to snack on with our beverages.

    To make things a little easier, I picked up a small cheese slicer kit and whipped up a convenient slicer/charcuterie board that’s easy to bring along.

    I started with a checkerboard pattern, with cherry and walnut.

    Then to make it a little more interesting, I made a template in the shape of the state of Illinois on my laser engraver and took it to the router.

    The final result looks great and fits the bill. If you happen to stop in on a Friday evening, there’s a chance you’ll see it!

  • Bradford Pear

    The trees in the boulevard in our neighborhood are mostly Bradford Pear. Anyone familiar with these trees knows how weak they are and how poorly they stand up to storms.

    One of these directly in front our house succomed to a storm this summer and a tree service came and cut it down. I was home when they started their work and asked if I could have a couple pieces of the trunk. They were more than happy, and left me with these:

    I processed, rough turned a few bowsl, and set them aside to dry.

    Now, five months later, the first of the batch was ready to turn (the smallest one). Wow, does it turn nice and easy. There’s one TINY crack in it, but it did make a good looking bowl.

    I’m looking forward to the other pieces getting dry enough to finish this winter.

  • Explorer QRZ-1 and CHIRP

    Last week I took advantage of the New Ham Jumpstart Program offered by QRZ.com and Gigaparts. As I only have a pair of Baofeng UV-21Rs, I thought it would be good to have another inexpensive, but higher quality, radio to compare and constrast with. The Explorer QRZ-1 arrived last Friday.

    I won’t go into a long review, but rather mention a quirk/bug I encountered with using CHIRP to program it instead of the provided “QRZ-1 Programmer” software by rtsystems.com. I have a local repeater all programmed in, but even though the receive CTCSS tone was correct, it wouldn’t break squelch until I performed a Tone Scan. If I powered off and back on, I had to re-do the scan in order for traffic to break squelch.

    After an evening discussing the issue with others on the local weekly net, I did some poking around and discovered that if I used the QRZ-1 Programmer software to download, and re-upload, the programming (without changing anything), the radio worked as expected. The tone configuration and everything looked correct after downloading, so I don’t know what was going wrong – other than the CHIRP driver is clearly marked/warned as being experimental.

    I need to do some more troubleshooting to see if I can get even more specific repro steps before I file an issue. When I did the original upload from CHIRP, I copied the memory entries from my Baofeng image rather than re-enter everything by hand. I’m wondering now if that was the ultimate issue.

    Anyway, I hope this information can help anyone else out there starting out with this device.

    73.

  • Whisky Smoker Box

    While we were on vacation in Michigan in 2023, we stopped by Bell Forest Products, located in Ishpeming, Michigan. I’ve placed a half dozen small orders with them over the past few years and was thrilled to finally get to visit.

    What a great place! We spent a lot of time picking through their pay-by-the-pount scap bins, picking out all sorts of smalls for lathe projects. I also grabbed a nice little cutoff of a piece of birdseye maple, thinking it would look good on a box lid at some point.

    Well a few months later I found the project for it. A small box to hold a whisky smoker set I was given. The box itself is walnut, and the lid is that maple. It looks great on the shelf!

  • 2024 Eclipse

    This is long overdue, but we went down to Washington County State Recreation Area in Nashville, IL for the 2024 total solar eclipse. Here are my two keepers of the event.

    We had incredible weather for an early April day in Illinois, and it made for a memorable experience.

  • Ham Radio Nets

    This is more for me to look back on in the future (but what isn’t on the blog, right?).

    I’ve been participating in a couple of the local “nets” put on by the Sangamon Valley Radio Club (http://www.svrc.org) since I got my Technician license last month. One problem I’m constantly having is the 2 meter simplex net.

    I have a pair of super inexpensive Baofeng UV-21R, and a few small antennas for them. They work great (in my mind at least, I have no frame of reference) for 70cm – I’ve been able to hit local repeaters and one that’s a pretty good distance away (40 miles).

    But this 2 meter problem really has me wondering if it’s just the radio. Tonight I went out on my roof with both radios to even _listen_ to the 2 meter net and could not hear a thing. Out of frustration I tossed on a Signal Stick and started walking around the neighborhood. I could hear net control loud and clear in a few spots, and one other participant only very faint.

    I went back inside and, while sitting at the kitchen table, keyed up and threw out my callsign. To my surprise, net control asked me to repeat – he actually heard me while inside my house. I went outside and replied, and was met with dead air again. Walked out front, same thing.

    I walked around the neighborhood again, hearing bursts of chatter but never enough to communicate. So I gave up and went in and waited for the 70cm net which was to happen about a half hour later.

    On that net, I was suprised to hear at least two others mention that they heard me loud and clear a couple of times, but then I’d disappear. Frustrating, but par for the course for these radios and their HT/mobile antennas?

    I have a radio or two on my Christmas list, and am looking out for any Black Friday deals on a mobile VHF/UHF radio I can use as a base station to hopefully rectify this problem. In addition, I just signed up for the ARRL Welcome Kit which includes an HT they’ve partnerered with Gigaparts on. I’m 100% certain it will be a better radio than the Baofengs. It’s supposed to arrive in a couple of days so I’m looking forward to comparing it on the next nets.

    I feel like I’m wasting everyone else’s time with the equivalent of “can you hear me now?”, and I’d like that to end.

  • Curly Walnut

    Following up on Logs to Bowls, here is a pair of bowls made from some figured walnut I received in log form earlier this year.

    This one has the best looking figure, but I did end up accidentally leaving some tool marks, much to my disappointment. The walls were already too thin for me to make one more pass to try and clean them up, so I’ve just resigned myself to being OK with it. That said, this is my favorite of the two.

    The other has a nice knot in the middle, which adds to its overall apperance. As simple as it is, I like the shape of this one better.