K4SPBlog

 In my never ending quest to continually delay my entry to the CW club, I think my nest hamateur venture will be satellite operations. Multiple satellites with ham radio capabilities orbit the earth at any given moment. One of my favorite youtube channels, saveitforparts , (my new life motto btw), does lots of satellite operations, mainly snooping on commercial, government, and even military satellites. He builds dishes with different low noise amplifiers (LNAs), low noise blockers (LNBs), software defined radios (SDRs), and a bunch of craigslist junk. He just installed a fully automated satellite tracker inside a surplus radome and I could definitely see myself wasting time on similar ventures.  The uber expensive M2 SATPACK, an example of a commercial egg beater antenna. To get my feet wet, I thought the best way would be using these ham radio focused satellites. The only equipment I would need is an antenna. Antennas must be circularly polarized due to the way satellites co...

 I've messed with a little AI in the past couple of years since LLMs exploded into the mainstream a couple years ago. Results initially were not promising but you just have to ask it to not lie (hallucinate) and not ask it something too obscure (something it's not trained for).  Short story long, I had an EFHW antenna that ran north-south and was long enough for 160m and went over some trees that are probably pushing 100ft. Unfortunately, I used cheap wire and it eventually snapped before I got around to replacing it with copper-clad steel(CCS). After that I put up an OFCD but that was dedicated to my Winlink station. Other than that I have a butterfly T2FD in the attic which is essentially a dummy load. TLDR, I only have one antenna and its committed full time. I just finished my master's and it's the holidays so I have time to kill. There's plenty of house projects to do and the weather's great but night owls like me can only replay COD MW3 so many times. I ha...