Getting into amateur radio these days is much like merging onto a freeway. If you hesitate in the on-ramp you might just pull over to the shoulder and watch all the traffic speed by while you sit there indecisively. But taking the metaphor further, you need to even select your vehicle first, and that is often the hardest part. I say vehicle because while one might think “car” the choices might also be motorcycle, trike, go-kart (illegal on freeways), or bicycle (also illegal, and has an entirely different, though parallel purpose). Selecting your first ham radio is hard especially because a new person doesn’t quite know what to do with one. Other online Elmer hams would ask “what do you want to do?” but often the answer is “I don’t know yet.” I would suggest that if you’re new to the hobby or thinking about starting, get the most versatile rig you can afford. If your budget doesn’t allow the latest souped-up awesomeness available on the market, look for most features for the money in the used market or the Chinese market. If you get serious about it, inevitably you will supplement your tools with more rigs; but for now try not to go ultimate cheap limited-function just to “try it out”. You will find the difficulty in doing what you want to try, especially if you don’t know what you want yet, might get you quickly discouraged and bored. In the corporate and/or creative world, starting out means high enthusiasm, low competency. Eventually you want to get to high enthusiasm, high competency. (Some say after a long while you get to low enthusiasm, high competency, and just become a paycheck collector.) With that in mind, you don’t want your new tools to get in the way. If there is so much to learn, and barriers along the way due to your rig, you can simply lose motivation. Reserve the specialty kits, the QRP rigs, the budget single-function items to later exploration once you’ve found your path in this 60,000 sub-hobby hobby of ours. Start off opening up your options. With that said, what are good starter rigs? Here are a few that come to mind (along with their prices at time of writing):

Winlink RMS Gateway AD6DM-10 is up, and serving the ham community. After collecting parts of this system for a few weeks, it is operational on 145.630 MHz in CM98hj. It is comprised of:

• An Alinco DR-135T VHF 2 meter transceiver set to 20 watts power
• An Arrow OSJ J-Pole up 21 ft at the home QTH
• A Masters Communications DRA-50 radio sound card interface with an Alinco-6 Mini DIN 6 adapter
• And a mini PC (Windows 10) and running on 12 volt power.
• Solar charged offgrid LiFePO4 battery power, for uninterrupted uptime (same system the shack rig uses).

Software running the gateway are:

In response to Ria Jairam N2RJ’s question on Twitter:

Tell me what’s wrong with #hamradio and how you’d fix it. If you’re uncomfortable responding on twitter, email me ria@n2rj.com

I’m not normally one to call out organizations but the ARRL is all we got as hams, really. People have argued with me on the merits of being a member, and I say “they’re all we have to represent us”. No other org lobbies the interests of hams and protects our bands– not ragtag petitioners, nor even conglomerations of clubs. Given that, the ARRL is our only hope. Yet it is a very slow and disconnected organization. Our “newsletters” are mostly stale and dry, member notification and communication is mainly through a magazine. Most ARRL officers have no online presence. Any “open door” policy by our elected officers is effectively blocked by lack of online presence. Board activities are secretive, if not simply poorly documented. Then there’s the brainstorm fatigue we experience yearly. The ARRL is always asking us what can we do to improve membership and get more people hooked into the hobby. If you have to ask, and this many times, perhaps it’s true that the hobby is not relevant anymore. But talk to many experienced hams and you’ll see motivation, drive, deep interest, projects, experimentation, and exhilaration when things come together. The ARRL needs to stop broadcasting its helplessness. It does not inspire confidence when our main and only org is grasping straws and constantly probing its members for solutions. If you lack a direction or ideas, hire experts (as most normal companies do when they lack talent). Or maybe hire and involve the very people who are actively demonstrating this momentum in their own endeavors. There are many such hams to choose from. Kind of like scouting for sports talent, bring those people in and give them the resources to create an impact with the membership (and non-membership). This is not simply done with a magazine article or two. It is not done through podcasts or five talking heads in a video livestream. There needs to be organizational support for sharing ideas online, communicating, interacting, and even sponsoring the individuals  who have these new inventions/ideas. Many hams oversimplify the ARRL as a bureacratic magazine subscription. Sticking to paper methods, and a disjointed bunch of half-finished web services contribute to this sentiment. Can we honestly say that the ARRL website is a good user experience? Yet the ARRL is so much more than how it appears, and the membership needs to see the organization’s strength. Hire PR. Hire talented active individuals. Bring in those who engage the hams and the public regularly. Become the best “club” that people are excited to attend. Nothing is wrong with ham radio in itself. But if we want it to continue to exist in the future, the main organization that represents it needs to be a hundred times more efficient and effective than it currently is.

The FCC has granted my request for new vanity callsign:

AD6DM

Why the new callsign? I wanted something easier to transmit in Morse code. But also, the initials make it a true “vanity” callsign. Truth be told, I applied for a 2x1 callsign and AD6DM was my second choice. But I got beat by a club for that shorter callsign. Those 2x1’s are really in demand! The migration to this new website domain is complete. The old site kf6ujs.net will remain for posterity while this site continues and grows as I do as a ham. Thank you for visiting!

Hi folks! I got into ham radio in 1999, but mostly just worked in VHF hitting SF Bay Area repeaters on 2 meters. I wanted ultimate portability, but never knew what it would be like to have a powerful rig. In 2017 (yes, 18 years later of my handheld talkies gathering dust), I finally got moved to find out more about HF and higher-wattage rigs, and got a Yaesu FT-857D. This opened up what hams have known all along: There’s a big world of radio out there to learn about and explore! This site will have some of my learnings and notes about new contacts, as well as some of the passions that drive my interest in radio technology. Thanks for stopping by! More to come, hopefully in less than 18 years.