Welcome to May, everyone! Summer is just around the corner (well, for those of us above the equator) Once again, thanks for all the great feedback on the April issue (and prior issues) of The Logger's Bark, the newsletter & magazine of W7DK, The Radio Club of Tacoma! You can read about the club at www.W7DK.org and if you're ever in Tacoma, WA on a Saturday, the club holds open house almost every Saturday from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM and all are welcome. Full details at the link. In this month's May 2025 issue of The Logger's Bark magazine: Lamptenna 3: CQ WPX 2025 using SSB with nothing but a FLOOR LAMP for an antenna! Numbers Stations: All about them and "are they still a thing"? The Japanese WOODEN CubeSat satellite - first wooden satellite ever built! Hands-on review of the RTL-SDR V4 receiver dongle History of DPRK DXpeditions Kits Corner: Great beginner's kit - the Elenco AM-780A build and review Review: Wouxun KG-935H tri-band HT that includes the 1.25m band How FT8 Works: Love it or hate it, FT8 is here to stay. Here's how it works Look Back at the Knight Kit T-60 CW & AM Transmitter 2025 W7DK Field Day Plans coming together - see the site layout plan And a whole bunch more - photos, tips, tricks, blurbs, puzzles, all about amateur radio and NEVER any ads! Download the May 2025 issue of The Logger's Bark HERE: >>>>>>>> https://static.qrz.com/w7dk/May2025-QRZ.pdf IMPORTANT: Be sure to actually download it to read - if you merely use Preview mode, the external links won't work! Also, to open a link, "Right Click" > "Open in New Tab". The software I use unfortunately doesn't support "targeted links"... unless you right click, you will leave the document. Here's a lower res version for slower connections: https://static.qrz.com/w7dk/May2025-QRZ-compressed.pdf Dave W7UUU Editor/Publisher [image below is static - the links won't work - download with the link above]
Sure - why not? I figure that if I didn't try it on FT8, CW, and SSB, that I'd be leaving an important data set out of the equation. And in fact, in some ways I did better on SSB than any other mode in that I actually "Worked All Continents" (except the big white one at the bottom). But Lamptenna is no more. However..... GutterTenna may possibly be in my future Dave W7UUU
Dave only the compressed PDF links are given, May and April's oddly. Either way Adobe Acrobat gives a "An error exists on this page..." on the compressed May PDF and just partially loads. I downloaded it multiple times but all with the same problem. I figured out removing the text "-compressed" in the URL downloads the regular PDF and that file loads fine. Thanks for sharing another months newsletter, they are great. de Tom K9ATS
A next editon of the Logger's Bark, which is outstanding entertaining and informative. Thanks for an updated list of many SDR software tools. Especially CubicSDR is still beta and versions are all below one. There is much to do instead, nothing is stable. Next there is a new software, which isnt in the list. Its called SDRangel and works with Linux Mint well. Its a bit complicated and to read the contained manual is recommended. Starting SDRangel begins with a black screen and a pulldown menu. But when it works well, good results are to see and hear. The hot thing of the month by Wouxun will be more intresting to me, when the tri-band contains the 23cm band. This will be a nice entrance device for SHF. Kenwood announced something like this for about two years or so by talking about future plans, but nothing happend until now. The P5 story is very intresting too. It shows an event from the past, which will not return. Its another world.
The idea that "Reinartz and his team" drove hamdom's discovery of the utility of the shortwaves is a grotesque misrepresentation of the international cooperative efforts that lead to the initial two-way transatlantic comms between 1MO - 8AB and 1XAM - 8AB in December 1923. Reinartz was a participant in, not the leader or a leader of, those efforts. Hams interested in the history will do well not to read such articles as the 1981 ham radio "Father of Shortwave" piece, but rather the QSTs from 1921 through 1925, which span chronicles hamdom's initial efforts to merely "get across"; describes the work and cooperation involved in setting up for the December 1923 success; announces the availability to hams of the 80, 40, 20, and 10 meter bands in the late summer of 1924; and then reports on the building excitement as hams went to work at 80, 40 and 20. (10 meters was quite difficult; getting circuits to work at all there would take awhile.) As for the fiction that hams were "given all of the shortwaves" and other made-up paraphrasings of what The Radio Act of 1912 set down as a basis for US amateur radio, the entirety of the 1912 law wrt our spectral usage appears in the Act's Regulation Fifteenth: The above does not "give amateur radio all of the shortwaves"; it told hams -- referred to only through inference from the phrase private stations -- what wavelengths they could not use. _ . . . _ Contrary to such hagiographies as the 1981 ham radio "Father of Shortwave Radio" article about Reinartz -- which strongly implies that Deloy's success was due to him having been given critical transmitter design information by Reinartz in the latter half of 1923 during Deloy's extended tour of ham stations in the States -- Deloy's station had by mid 1923 become a near-beacon well before his visit to the States. Read the QSTs, which include pix of Deloy's station before his trip to the States. And here's a fun lead to follow: See if you can find in the November 1923 issue of QST a short, cryptic item about how Deloy helped 1MO and 1BHW "poke a hole in the air" with a 72-foot antenna mast erected at 282 Fern Street, West Hartford. Do some research: Whose address was that, really? What was Schnell's actual registered QRA? (Don't know what that means? Start learning. Hint: It wasn't 282 Fern.) Think about how cool that was: In October 1923, Deloy himself helped put up the antenna used at one of the two US stations that achieved two-way TA contact with him two months two months later. (And so why didn't the actual owner of 282 Fern Street take credit for working Deloy, with Schnell's call sign, 1MO, going doing in history -- along with Reinartz's 1XAM -- instead? We can only guess, and I have one; what's yours?) Start reading original, primary sources to learn this history. Wrote AWA's W2LW, "History that is not fact is fiction."
I remember years ago perhaps in QST mag, some hams loaded into the steel beams of a steel bridge, a big bridge, using it as an antenna and made contacts.
Merci d'avoir lu la newsletter du club. Heureux que vous appréciiez le contenu. Thank you google translate!
Dang you, UUU! You're making me want to move back to Tacoma! Well, not Tacoma exactly, Olympia is my hometown where I got my Novice in 1969. WN7KDS then WA7KDS as a short-lived Tech followed by General following an eventful trip to the New Federal Office Building in Seattle. It's just that I like sunlight and here in Southern New Mexico, we get lots of it! Tacoma, alas, doesn't.