Category Archives: Amateur Radio

Mike and Key ARC Swap Meet March 7th, 2020

The 39th annual Mike and Key ARC Swap Meet will take place on Saturday, March 7th, 2020 at the Washington State Fairgrounds in Puyallup.

This is one of my favorite ham radio events in the Seattle area and I’ll be there again this year, hopefully with a seller’s table (still waiting on confirmation).

Edit: I won’t be attending after all. Seattle has been significantly impacted by COVID-19 and King county is discouraging people from attending events with large groups of people.

The Mike and Key Amateur Radio Club Swap Meet is next weekend in Puyallup, WA

The 36th annual Mike and Key Amateur Radio Club Electronics Show and Fleamarket will be held next Saturday, March 11th at the Washington State Fairgrounds in Puyallup, WA.

This is one of the best amateur radio events in Washington state and one that I look forward to every year. A couple years ago I came home with a working Hameg HM-507 analog+digital oscilloscope (pictured above) for a hundred bucks!

I have a table at the swap meet this year, and I’ll be selling Geiger counter kits, misc. electronics, and amateur radio gear. Look for the MightyOhm banner.

I hope to meet some local folks there!

Surplus Summit 2012 Part One: Los Angeles

Testing 47GHz radios
(Photo: Tony KC6QHP testing out his 47GHz amateur radio. Remember this post? All that work paid off, the radio works!)

Last month I cashed in some airline miles and finally got to visit some old friends and spend some time in beautiful Southern California. Some long-time readers of the blog may remember the last time I did something like this in 2009.

While I was there I visited my good friend Tony in Los Angeles, and we went on a tour of surplus electronics and swap meets that we called Surplus Summit 2012.

Continue reading Surplus Summit 2012 Part One: Los Angeles

New call sign, RIP KF6PBP

I got my amateur radio license on December 31st, 1997.

I was an undergraduate at the time. My friend and classmate Tony (KC6QHP) had been trying to convince me to get my ham license for months.

I finally decided to go for it over winter break. I picked up a copy of Now You’re Talking! from a local bookstore (remember those?) and crammed for a week. I took the test the following weekend and passed with a perfect score, 35/35. (The morse code requirement for the Technician license was eliminated in 1991.)

That Christmas I got a Kenwood TH-79A/D, a very modern-looking radio at the time. (I still think it looks great, but it has aged poorly, the controls are scratchy and the battery becomes disconnected easily.) I nervously waited for my new call sign to show up in the FCC database. (This was before the ULS existed, but there was a website where you could see the call signs that were issued each day.)

Imagine my horror when on December 31st my name came up listed next to the call

 

KF6PBP

 

What’s wrong with that, you say? Sound it out. K F 6 P B P. Imagine trying to make a contact on the air with that call. PBB? BPP? PPP? I have even had operators struggle with the phonetic version (Papa Papa Bravo? No, Papa Bravo Papa. Easy, right? Wrong.) I remember some old-timers trying to console me when I first got my license by coming up with clever mnemonics such as “Peanut Butter Pretzels”, which I still chuckle at.

Admittedly, my frustration level has always been kept in check by the fact that I have never been very active on the air, and most of the contacts I have made have been with friends who had memorized my callsign anyway.

This year, after having the callsign KF6PBP for over 13 years, I finally decided to do something about it. I applied for a vanity call sign.

But which call to apply for? I’m an Amateur Extra now (I tested for General and AE in 2009 and 2010, respectively), so I could have tried to get one of the much-fought over 1×2 or 2×1 callsigns (like K6RF, W6TC, etc). I didn’t see any that were worth fighting (and waiting) for. So, I decided to take a different approach and searched for an easy-to-get 1×3 callsign that reflected my personality or interests. I found a few that I liked and narrowed them down to 2 candidates (one favorite and a backup in case someone else applied for the same call and I didn’t get it).

As luck would have it, I got my first choice. Last night, I was granted the new call sign

 

It feels a little bit weird to be saying goodbye to the call sign I’ve held for so long, but I’m looking forward to operating with my new call with fewer corrections. (The phonetic version has a nice ring to it – Whiskey 6 Oscar Hotel Mike.)

I’m getting back into amateur radio these days, so expect to see more posts on the subject. Maybe I’ll even get to chat with some readers of the blog on the air?

(Are you a ham?  Leave a comment!)