This article was submitted by Jeryl Matlock, KQ4EDV. She collaborates with TARS, the Tallahassee Amateur Radio Society, accessible via k4tlh.org. TARS is a community hub for amateur radio enthusiasts. Some people group emergency management hazards into three broad categories: natural, human-caused and technological. Others in emergency management use a paradigm from the field of economics, consisting of Gray Skies, Gray Rhino, Black Swan, and Dragon King scenarios. So, what do rhinos, swans and dragons have to do with emergencies and disasters and how do I prepare myself and my family for these scenarios? That is an excellent question. The best place to […]

This article was submitted by Jeryl Matlock, KQ4EDV. She collaborates with TARS, the Tallahassee Amateur Radio Society, accessible via k4tlh.org, is a community hub for amateur radio enthusiasts. They host monthly meetings on the first Thursday of each month at 7 PM at the American Red Cross in Tallahassee, FL, fostering a sense of community and shared interest. For those looking to get involved in amateur radio, TARS facilitates license testing on odd-numbered months. Beyond formal gatherings, the group also organizes casual “TARS Lunch Bunch” meetups every Thursday, providing an informal setting for members to connect and discuss their shared […]

My new end-fed half-wave (EFHW) antenna consists of a 132-foot radiating wire fed via a 49:1 matching transformer.  The transformer brings the impedance of the wire to 50 ohms, more or less.  It’s definitely “more or less.”  EFHWs are high impedance antennas and their characteristics are sensitive to their surroundings.  My store-bought EFHW came with a small in-line coil six feet out from the matching transformer.  That coil is there to add a small amount of inductance to lower the antenna’s resonant frequency on 10 meters.  This is a tried and true approach to getting an EFHW antenna to cover […]

As with ham radio in general, this column has readers at all levels of technical expertise.  Ohm’s law might seem basic to many, but to others it’s seldom used and in the category of “once learned then forgotten.”  As a practicing EE, Ohm’s law is second nature to me.  It’s one of the lenses through which I view the everyday world.  I can’t see a transceiver, or a power supply, or an antenna, or power lines, or a toaster without thinking about how many amps, volts and/or watts are involved. Meanwhile, most of us are not EEs.  The good news […]

Scope: This article focuses mostly on CW and N1MM logger since that’s what I mostly operate. What is Telnet? Telnet was developed in 1960 and is one of the first internet standardized utilities by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).  It was used extensively for mainframe and Unix system maintenance in the early days of computers by sending commands.  Unfortunately, Telnet transmits all information including usernames and passwords in plain text, so security is a big concern.  The utility is built into almost all DOS and Microsoft Windows operating systems. The Telnet program is the standard used by many logging […]