Ham radio

[bae]

For the second time in ~6 months, my entire county lost phone service, cell service, 911 dispatching, and a fair bit of our Internet connectivity. We are a remote community made up of small islands off the US mainland on the US/Canada border.

Luckily, we still had the playbook fresh, and heck, I hadn't even unpacked some of my kit from the ARRL Field Day this last weekend.

Spent the day at one of our outlying fire stations manning the station for walk-in emergencies. Our local ham folks and our fire/rescue agency play well together.

Check out my back-woods comm center :

[razz]

Wonderful to see the preparedness and the comfort of knowing that it is available. Thanks for sharing.

[ToomuchStuff]

Hope you were busy enough to keep you out of that uncomfortable looking chair.

[bae]

I have now finished assembling my perfect Zombie Apocalypse radio station.

The Elecraft KX3 transceiver, in combination with the Elecraft PX3 panadaptor. The receiver is one of the finest ones ever made, I can hear almost everything on it. It only puts out 10 watts of power maximum, which is miniscule, on the other hand it draws almost no power at all while receiving, and very little when transmitting - I ran it an entire day making contacts all over the world and did not deplete a small 7.5 amp-hour SLA battery, of the type you might find sitting in a small UPS for a PC, or in an alarm system. Today, on an overcast Pacific NW day, I was able to recharge the battery faster than I was drawing it down. You could run it for an afternoon off 8 rechargeable AA batteries, which fit neatly inside its case, if you don't feel like carting around a "real" battery.

It has a very good antenna tuner built into the radio, so you can use most anything for an antenna. I was playing with it using a simple wire thrown over a tree branch, something that took 2 minutes to set up. With that I was able to talk to Japan, Russia, Argentina, Alaska, most of Canada, and all over the USA with only 5-10 watts of power, less than a small lightbulb would use.

The panadapter attachment on the left allows you to see a wide range of radio spectrum, and quickly zoom your radio to the signal of interest. This is a game-changer, especially if you are operating on battery power and want to be efficient.

The whole setup is quite small (as you can see compared to the size of the standard PC keyboard they are next to), and weighs just a couple of pounds.

[Packy]

I don't know if anyone suggested this, but first you need a dedicated, freestanding, man-cave "Ham Shack" building in the backyard, that is completely off limits to wimmin, unless they are bringing you a sandwich or are a pizza delivery girl. Also, you should be smoking unfiltered cigarettes & drinking a little--or hey--even a lot of whiskey every day, so you will develop that deep, rich baritone voice like Johnny Carson that is so necessary for radio broadcasting. Also, you should equip your ham shack with a 4537-456 zillohertz, qwe-786 Megadeth, 098nmz, double-thororeum wavebach resounder along with an Enderbsol #456789043-a4 Delaminor. Then learn Morris code(just ask any Eagle Scout to tutor you), and you will be able to shoot the breeze with Ham operators on other planets in distant galaxies. 10-4 ol' buddy. Have a good 'un. Over & out.