Anyway, my inbox has been blowing up with DX Sherlock alerts telling me that 6 meters has been open most evenings over the last few weeks. I finally broke down and dug out the Buddipole components on Friday so I could try to snag a few QSOs on 50 MHz. I managed to grab a few SSB QRP QSOs with the FT-817 into VE4 and VE6-land on Friday night using the Buddipole in a simple dipole configuration. The band was in great shape that night, as I could hear a lot of East Coast stations coming in quite strong via multihop Es. On Saturday, I tried to work CW QRP on 50.096 MHz but had zero success even after calling CQ many, many times. The band was open and there was still plenty of activity on the SSB portion of the band, but CW was a bust. Come on CW ops, we've got to do better than this.

I still managed to make it a interesting ham radio night. After packing in the gear from the back deck, I went into the shack, flipped on the HF rig, and checked 20 meters (just around sunset local time). Very soon I stumbled upon the legendary Martti, OH2BH calling US West Coast stations. After a quick tune-up, I was able to snag him within about 4 calls. He was absolutely booming into Beaverton (by the sounds of it, he was booming into the entire western portion of the US). This was my first QSO with Martti and was memorable to be sure.

Moving on to a more unpleasant topic, am I the only one who things that most of the ham mailing lists are dying of a creeping mediocrity and groupthink mentality? The big two QRP-Ls are mostly a joke as far as getting an interesting, topical discussion going. On the other hand, start bitching about computers or some other off-topic old fart rant, and you'll get 30 messages a day. The SKCC group made me sick with its virtual pitchforks-and-torches assault on the new owner of Vibroplex because he had the audacity to replace the stamped brass identification plates with a silkscreened version. The way that a few prominent members of that group (including one who is affiliated with a competing key manufacturer I might add) character assassinated the owner was quite disgusting.

This provides a nice segue into another topic people love to hate: Twitter. I quit tweeting a few months ago due to the large jackass/decent person ratio that I was experiencing. I thought I would miss it quite a bit, but once I got over the DTs in a few days I didn't really miss it much at all. I still debate whether I should go active on Twitter again, because I see some utility in it; but even when you remove the jerk factor, it still feels like drinking from a firehose most of the time. Not to mention that huge time sink that results from checking your account all of the time make sure you are up-to-the-minute on the latest crap. What to do?

Finally, a plea. Some of you may know of qrpedia.com, which I tried (and failed miserably) to turn into a QRP/homebrewer aggregated blog and knowledge repository. It's already in sad shape, but with the new kid coming, I know I'll have no time to devote to it, so I need to let it go. I don't want to nuke the site because there are a handful of people who put a lot of hard work into posting content there. I would like to sell the site for a nominal price and have it go to someone who could give it another chance. Please contact me if this interests you at all. Prices and terms are very negotiable.

Anyway, let me show you the efforts of a few people who have helped in blowing a little dust off of our vintage hobby. First up is the website and video blog of XR0Y, the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) DXpedition. These guys have a very visually appealing website with tons of information about the operation, a blog to keep you updated on the latest news, a Twitter feed, and perhaps best of all, a really cool video blog. The production values are top-notch (they are promising HD video of the actual operation) and it's interesting to get a behind-the-scenes look at a DXpedition from start to finish. Here are the first three videos in the series; it looks like many more are on the way:

Next, a topic a little bit nearer to my heart, courtesy of W2LJ. Larry was contacted by VK1AA regarding a new QRP transmitter kit from GenesisRadio called the Q5. It looks like this kit is geared towards the new kitbuilder/homebrewer, perhaps as something to build on a club "kit night". The design uses CMOS logic for the LO and driver amp, which feeds into a class-A PA (about 1 watt output). I don't see any low-pass filtering on the output and there's no specification on the spurious products, so an outboard filter might be in order.

GenesisRadio got an excellent video spokesman for their kit; young VK2FJDX. Check out the FB job he does in promoting the new kit:

To those ends, I'm going to post more often regarding cool content that I've found on other blogs (much like the SolderSmoke blog). Analytics has shown me how important this crosslinking is for traffic generation and for building awareness of other blogs. Hopefully it won't distract much from the original content. Let me know if you think it gets out of balance.

Update

Somebody does read these posts! I'm pleased to see that some other folks agree with me. One nice side effect of this post was that I was able to smoke out a few new blogs to link to. Thanks everyone!

In this article, VE7BPO gives a very nicely detailed explanation of his methodology for testing the stability of the LC-tuned VFO circuit which is the subject of the post. He mentions that you can always use a stable receiver with a narrow bandwitdth to listen for VFO frequency shifts by ear (a perfectly valid method for homebrewer testing, in my experience). Well apparently, that's not good enough for some of the Internet experts:

I have taken some flack on the World Wide Web and by email for using my ears as a VFO stability tester. Perhaps this is well deserved criticism, as it does not quantify drift. However, the last time I checked, receivers are meant for listening to signals and almost any drifting oscillator beat note will not stay centered in a narrow IF pass band of a stable receiver. If a VFO stays put in a narrow pass band, I am pretty sure it is stable enough for use in a home-built transmitter or receiver. From my experience, albeit limited, any drift you can measure you can also hear. I sure wish some of my critics would publish their work so I wouldn't have to perform so many experiments to try to improve my hobby projects! The target audience of this web site is people who want to have some fun and perhaps do not have hundreds of dollars worth of test equipment. It is okay to use a receiver as a piece of test equipment if you want to or don't have anything better to use. Apart from digitization, miniaturization and the demise of HAM radio in general, I posit some of the other reasons that analog hobby electronics is dying is lack of mentorship, imagination and fear of failure. Every design or method generally has good points and bad points. This web site is truly for people who like to experiment with and enjoy building simple electronics circuits. This is the "popcorn" niche I aspire to. I have found that it is very easy to criticize, but far more difficult to contribute. Hopefully I am in the latter group! [Emphasis mine]

It really fries me to see people like Todd, who put such much time and energy into documenting their hobby for other people at no financial gain, get a raft of crap from online bullies. There's not much to add to his statement, since he pretty much nails it, but I've had a small taste of the same thing. Fortunatly, most of the hams I've interacted with online have been at least cordial; but I know how frustrating it can be to put a lot of energy into a labor of love, only to have it criticized by the know-it-all do-nothings of the world.

I emphasized one sentence in that quote to give everyone something to think about. It's quite tempting for someone who is freely giving their time to the hobby to throw in the towel on sharing their work when they are forced to put up with too much of this nonsense. So please, show support to your favorite authors and bloggers, they need all they can get.

Fashion Nerd at Dayton 2009

She gives a shout out to some popular names in ham radio and QRP, including a couple near and dear to my heart. My new employer, Buddipole, is mentioned as a popular destination at the con for portable antenna gear. She also singles out one of my favorite QRPers, Steve "Goathiker" WG0AT.

Neat to see that the great-grandaddy of the Maker movement is still getting some love from the new generation. Also great to see some more people near my age getting into the hobby.

If you have been paying attention to my Twitter stream, you may have noticed that I've been in a nasty funk regarding my interest in radio. I think it got started a few weeks ago with some online behavior between hams that I found extremely discouraging. I'm not going to name names, since I have no intention of trying to stir up hard feelings.

I've also noticed an uptick of condescending nastiness from hams online towards those who hold moral, religious, and political views similar to mine. I don't mind small amounts of these types of discussion in my ham radio content (whether I agree with the view or not), but the level of vitriol has been really bothersome to me lately. Personally, I try to steer clear of mixing these topics with my ham radio stuff, although I have been occasionally guilty of letting a bit of it sneak through at times. In the past, I just ignored the stuff that I didn't like. But considering the state of the world, right now I just want to get away from all of the negativity and back-biting when I read about radio. However, it seems like all I see lately is exactly this type of behavior. I just don't have the stomach to deal with it at this point. I guess you could say that I have a thin skin at the moment.

Sitting down to operate or melt some solder didn't seem to help either. Usually I can sit down with an idea or a circuit and have a lot of fun tacking the thing together and getting it to work. Now, I just don't seem to have the attention span to get through even a simple build. Perhaps I'm coming down with a case of ADD, LOL!

Add in the stress of my greatly reduced paycheck, uncertainty about my employment stability, and planning and paying for a wedding, and you've got the recipe for a bombed out Jason.

I have been enjoying doing other things, such as fixing up our new home, working on putting in our new vegetable garden, baking bread, catching up on reading, and watching the Trail Blazers make their first run to the playoffs in many years.I am extremely grateful that I have other things that I still enjoy, which tells me that this probably isn't some kind of depression.

I suspect that everyone who is into a passionate hobby or profession hits the wall like this after long enough. I just need to find the trick to recovering the passion. Maybe I need to completely unplug for awhile to give my psyche a rest.

I don't intend to let this place blog fade. I still have a ton of neat ideas floating around in my head and in my notebook. But I also do not want to post a bunch of worthless crap here about my psychological state that you don't care about while I try to get out of the funk. So I've been silent, hoping to regain that spark quickly. Since it still hasn't come back, I wanted to at least let you know what's going on so that you are aware that the blog will be back on track at some point. The question now is "when?"

So now the belt needs to be tightened a bit more at our household. Given my personal theories about what's going on in the world, I seriously doubt that this is the worst that we will see. Let's just say that I will be extremely grateful if I still have this same job in a year from now. With that in mind, I have been giving serious consideration to getting into the kit-selling business. Not that I expect to ever get rich selling kits to hams, but I really enjoy design and it would be nice to at least be able to supplement my income now that it's taking a pretty big hit.

Along those lines, one of the reasons why the technical content has been light around here lately is that I have been working on a kit for a well-known QRP club. I don't know when I can spill the beans or how much I can say about it, but I think it should be an interesting and fun kit for a lot of builders. Keep an eye on the blog for more details about the kit when I'm able to release them.

Furthermore, I have some other kit ideas that sprang from this original design. Those are the ones that I would like to bring to market under my own banner, along with some other unique designs that aren't currently on the market. At best, it will still be months before you see anything commercial coming out of my lab, but I'm going to do my best to get the ball rolling very soon since I've now got a fire lit under my butt. I'm still going to post other technical content when I can, just don't be surprised if that category is a bit light for the next few months while things spin up over here.

A good portion of the ham blog intelligentsia have been riding the currently popular "change" meme right through our isolated little corner of the net. There's been a lot of rhetoric about how we need to turn our backs on our past, discard nostalgia, and make the great leap forward into the future. The theory is that all of the old farts pining for the "good ol' days" is driving away much of the new blood needed to revitalize the hobby. It is claimed that if we fail to make this fundamental change in our focus, ham radio will wither and die.

I will be the first to admit that there are two very unappealing aspects of ham radio for me: the cranky curmudgeons and the whacker brigade. The first group seems to have taken up a second home on the Internet when not on 75 meters, berating all lesser beings and regaling the rest of us mere mortals with their tales of heroics. The latter group pretty much speaks for themselves. Every time I tried to get involved with EMCOMM (before I became wise to the realities of that world), I came away severely discouraged about the clique mentality and the lofty goals coupled with the laziness of the majority of members. That said, most of the hams that I have met do not fit into these categories. Sure there are plenty of nutjobs in our hobby, but show me one hobby (especally a geeky one like ours) that doesn't have their share of cranks.

The question is then whether abandoning our history is going to change these aspects of our hobby for the better. No, it's not. The two have nothing to do with each other. Yes, the curmudgeons invoke The Past as it were the golden age which we will never obtain again. Does that make the past inherently bad? Of course not. Nostalgia in itself is not a bad thing or a good thing, it just is. It has its place in reminding us where we came from and what makes our hobby a special thing. As with just about anything else in life, it can be used postitively or negatively.

One problem is the growing number of people in our culture who want to banish something because they don't like the negative aspects of that thing. Part of being a responsible adult is recognizing that when you have the freedom to do something, you have to accept the good and bad aspects of that activity and deal with them accordingly. I don't need someone to decide what's best for me, and I suspect that you don't either. The last thing we need is some kind of reality bubble to eliminate the things that make us uncomfortable.

Another thing that bothers me is the nebulous aspect of this desire for a shake-up in the hobby. There seem to be no concrete proposals for how to improve things, other than sending our past down the memory hole. Change simply for the the sake of change, in any endeavor, is insane. I'm not on board the change bandwagon. Too many incredibly destructive and stupid things have been done in this world in the name of progress.

If something works, you don't just throw it out because it is old. What is wrong with enjoying something just because you enjoy it? You always hear about non-hams who ask hams why we use amateur radio, when we could just pick up a cell phone. The answer, of course, is that we do it because we enjoy it, not because it is superior. Why go fishing when you can just buy a fish at the supermarket? Same principle. It seems that we lose sight of this concept in our own little ham radio subgroups. So what if you think CW is the only true mode. What does it matter if you think life is too short for QRP? Who cares if you don't like boatanchors and AM? There are plenty of hams who do, and they should be able to pursue their interests as long as it stays within the rules. I'm sure that for each ham who likes a particular aspect of amateur radio, there are plenty of others who hate it and want it to go away. If there's anything this hobby needs, it's more of the live and let live attitude.

There is another reason why we shouldn't just throw away our past. Recall the old maxim: KISS. Many times, the simplest solution is also the best. Just because a technology is old does not make it inferior. I won't belabor this point, since it has already been thoroughly covered in other places (especially with the CW aficionados). But we should not act like children with ADD, discarding the old because we like the new, shiny toy better.

Let's get down to the bottom line. The magic of radio is reason that most of us are in the hobby. Sure, there are those who got a ticket because they are weather spotters, because their spouse has one, because someone at the ARRL told them 10 years ago that it was just as good as having a cell phone. However, the majority of us are into amateur radio because we like radio for radio's sake.  The stories of our illustrious past remind us of this, which is why we enjoy them. Gutting our history will remove the soul of our hobby and take away that which makes us unique. Might as well just trade in our Elecraft K2s for Motorola TalkAbouts.

What we need is advancement of the radio art, not undefined change. There are areas where we are still making progress in developing the art, although not nearly as much as we used to. But how can we compete with the rapid development pace of the old days? We can't. As with any nascent technology, radio was pioneered by the tinkerer and the amateur. But radio has now matured into a multi-billion dollar industry. There is no way that we can compete with the R&D resources that industry can pour into new product development. Most of the leading edge ham technology these days often comes from those who already work in the radio industry and have access to many resources that the average ham does not. This does not make us worthless, but we have to be honest about our place in the world of radio.

No, we are never going to live up to the glory days of our predecessors. No amount of progress will ever get us back to the same level as the commercial radio industry. But that's OK; it means that we did our job, and that radio is one of the most successful and transformative technologies in the history of mankind. Wireless is becoming more and more important each day. We should take pride in knowing that we paved the way, and that we still have a link to that spirit of radio which brought us such wonderous inventions.

They also appear to still have all of the advertisments, which in my opinion is great. If they can get the sponsors to continue to pay for advertisments, while keeping the publication free, that would be a great step forward for ham radio publications. I am curious how they are going to change their ad pricing structure, since all of the traditional readership metrics have to be tossed out the door with online distribution.

One interesting change is that the QRP column has been reappropriated to now focus on trail friendly radio. I'm curious what the impetus was for this shift, but it should still be interesting. The regular columnist, KI6SN, has even setup up a new blog to compliment his revamped column.

I'm pleased to see that WorldRadio seems to be carrying on with the same level of professionalism as before. This shift in the distribution model could be healthy for the hobby (*ahem* QST *ahem*), but only time will tell if this is sustainable or not.