Max’s First Ham Radio!
I found this old General Radio 1001-A Signal Generator at the Mike and Key Swap, got it for $10 bucks. With the idea of making Max a radio to play with. It turned out perfect. I made all the knobs potentiometers so that it makes the needle swing all over. And the switch turns on the red light. I have future plans to add a simple audio tone generator and use the dial to adjust the tone. Additional add-on features are actually hooking the microphone into a FRS radio so he has a base station to call mommy from!
HRD 6.0 and Windows8
With new HRD software came the decision to buy a new computer update from XP on the shack computer to windows8. It was quite a jump in technology laziness was the main factor but with a new PC the whole things was updated. First computer I purchased in 8 years. Its sweet. I actually like windows8 the "app store" is more like a crap store. But you dont need to use any "apps". Everything is working perfect I am even running my shack without a serial port (shock)
Intel i3-3.3 with 4500 video, 8GB ram, fancy hard disk, windows8, Rigblaster Advantage, IC756P3 (today) - point and click QSO!
K7MHI has a Tower and Beam!
Whew.. what a lot of work! after a lot of help and planning, the antenna project is done! Tower up Antenna up.. lets hope that's the last of it!
You can see full detailed info and photos of the tower install here, and of the antenna install here.
New Antenna Almost in the air!
So its been a long time dream in the works for every ham operator to get a tower in the air. With great cost, I ended up with an antenna from AA7ST-SK. This combined with a tower from my neighbor W7LRD. Brings me to today.. The dry run testing of everything connected on the ground!
Antenna rotor is working awesome, SWR is awesome, all systems go! this weekend I have a man lift on order to put everything on line! and 50ft up!
full details here on the tower project
New Ham Shack and Garage!
After a lot of work, we have a new garage! this is also my new ham shack! I added a carport to keep the truck dry as well! yahoo!
ICOM 756ProIII Memory Keyer
So I have been wanting to do this for a while and finally got around to it. I have long looked at the I-Mate but never wanted the price for what it did. So I went about hacking up my own interface and here it is!
K7MHI Button Box for ICOM 756 Pro3
The button box has memory keys for contesting as well as a PTT button, frequency up and down buttons, and the switch is to disconnect the MIC from my Heil ProSet Plus, I do this because I run my Rigblaster Advantage directly to the rear accessory port so I don't need to mess with things going digital. However using that port opens the mic on the front jack... this was my workaround!
Schematics pulled from the ICOM manual page 18 and 104
How SpotOn saved me from canceling Spotify
So I suckered into going legal by using Spotify, after lots of consideration of the iMatch in the iCloud I decided that I only want to stream music and not deal with storage on a device. I am tired of paying crazy prices for apples storage memory.
So I chose Spotify, found a long free trial of premium, and love the ability to just search up (almost any) song I want. Then, also link to my home pc for music they just don't have yet. Whatever ... if you have a clue you have seen enough about this.
But here, at the end of my demo of Spotify... And I am not happy, two things 1) the Spotify radio isn't available in the iOS app. 2) the iOS app is not universal. Simple things if you ask me and it's a joke they don't simply solve them. Enough to make me dump it and go back to just using pandora.
Break from that for a moment...
I love pandora, I have used it for years and the most amazing thing about 3G is having pandora in my car. However, I seem to lately have ran pandora dry, the radio stations seem to be repetitive and I listened to all the music there is to listen to that I like. (nothing wrong with that) one thing about pandora I never liked is the penalty for skipping songs or FF/RW.
Back to program... So I complained on the online Spotify support to get totally ignored (lame). Just today I saw this post about a app SpotOn it's a API that will run pandora like radio and use your premium account to play music. All from iOS. I hope someone sees this blog post because the only reason I didn't cancel Spotify this month is because of this app. Now I don't know how good it is with random new and loved music as its only 6 hours old and I have ran it on my iPad for 20 min while blabbering my thoughts here. So far it promises to please, playing random music - At least in this period. So another month of premium thanks only ... and solely to the creators of SpotOn
Fix up your pc without me!
So the other day I was trying to remove windows update junk files and ran into this little application, slimcleaner. It's a rare, and functional nifty application.
Not only will this do a rather awesome job at finding just about everything I can think of to remove that is temporarary. It will also look at everything you have and rate it for "community trustworthiness" very awesome.
If your pc is slow or just needs a sprucing up I highly recommend running this application and run everything on it that is "easy or normal user" if you see it report that you have risky software remove it!
One word of warning this software makes money with a partnership with other people when you install it they ask if you want to install AVG browser bar. Well I'm sure this is handy software please be aware this could slow you down and to decline the install of such software if your don't want it.
