I got back from shopping in London this afternoon to discover a 6-metre opening from our grid square to points south! I had gone into London looking for antenna “fixin’s” - coax, connectors, wire, etc. - but found precious little, I am afraid. I guess I am going to have to shop in Toronto or Buffalo, and I don’t think there is anything going on ( Read more... )

Well, you KNOW you are having antenna problems when you can pull in a local 75-metre phone net better on your 40-year-old Zenith Transoceanic than you can on your random wire antenna and an actual ham radio receiver designed to function best on the ham bands ( Read more... )

After studying the Canadian version of the rules and regulations governing amateur radio for a couple of weeks, I wrote the test this evening in London. I passed the Basic exam easily with 95%, which gives me full privileges on HF as well as above 30 MHz except for limits on running high power, building my own transmitters or setting up repeaters ( Read more... )

It is snowing solidly outside my office window this afternoon. It has been pretty much all day. It isn’t a heavy snow. The flakes are very small and icy looking. But it is slowly accumulating. I hear the Oxford County snow removal people on the scanner. They have been at it for the last couple of days actually since areas west and north or us ( Read more... )

By ham I mean, of course, an Amateur Radio Operator. The fact of the matter is, that I still love radio. I love the technology, the idea of it - the ability to communicate over vast distances without wires! This has always turned me on. Before the Internet came along, ham radio was just about the only way for an ordinary citizen to communicate ( Read more... )