Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Courage Kenny Rehabilitation Institute Handiham World Weekly E-Letter for the week of Wednesday, 30 July 2014

Ham Radio Memories

IC-7200 tuned to 3.925 MHz and LDG AT-200Pro tuner

It's summer and time to daydream a little.

Sweet, sweet summertime.  Ever since I was a small kiddo growing up in southern Minnesota, I've cherished summer.  A lot of it had to do with getting out of school for summer vacation. I never had any problem keeping my grades up, and never had to serve a sentence in summer school.  So I had the summer free, and nothing was sweeter than collecting my stuff from the desk on the last day of school and walking home with my neighborhood friends knowing that the whole summer stretched before us!

But summer did have hot, humid days and sometimes during the heat of the day it was better to stay in the basement and work on some project, play board games, or read comic books. One of my projects was a Knight-Kit Span Master 4-band AM and short-wave radio.  Dad bought it for me and gave me some pointers on soldering, which I had never done before. When the Span Master was completed, it worked like a charm.  The simple circuit was pretty foolproof, and in spite of its simplicity it performed amazingly well.  The circuit was a regenerative design that could produce a lot of gain without a lot of parts.  I put the radio on the headboard shelf of my bed and ran a wire antenna out the nearby window of my second-floor room.  

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Courage Kenny Rehabilitation Institute Handiham World Weekly E-Letter for the week of Wednesday, 16 July 2014

Welcome to Handiham World.

Planning for that next phase in life

View of condo apartments with balconies and lawn with trees and light standards.

Right now I'm looking at a photo of my mother-in-law's assisted living condo building and grounds.  There are balconies outside the second floor units and patios outside the ground floor units. A spacious lawn falls away gently to the right, punctuated by light standards and trees.  

Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Courage Kenny Rehabilitation Institute Handiham World Weekly E-Letter for the week of Wednesday, 09 July 2014

Welcome to Handiham World.

The IC-7200 goes to the rig hospital

Three IC-7200 radios stacked up at Dayton.
Yes, it was another casualty of the Field Day lightning strike here at the WA0TDA station.  Between that and getting out of town for a long Independence Day holiday, I haven't had a lot of time to get on the air.  Luckily I do have an IC-706M2G radio to use while the IC-7200 gets fixed, but I'm probably going to be too busy to pick up the microphone anyway. 
That's summer for you!

Read or listen here.

Wednesday, July 02, 2014

Courage Kenny Rehabilitation Institute Handiham World Weekly E-Letter for the week of Wednesday, 02 July 2014

We were sitting down to dinner Saturday evening, when there was a flash of lightning and a crash of thunder.  

Notice that I didn't say, "followed by a crash of thunder", right?

lightning 








That is never a good sign.  Since light travels at 300,000,000 meters per second and sound at only about 340 meters per second in air, we know that light from a lightning discharge will arrive at our location much more quickly than the sound of thunder.  That is why we usually see a flash of lightning and then wait several seconds for the inevitable clap of thunder caused by the discharge.  When the two are simultaneous, that means the lightning discharge is very close by.  This one was nearly simultaneous, so it was very nearby.  
But the power stayed on and we finished dinner.