Welcome to the Back Burner Blog

This is an ongoing project. Updates will be posted as new information becomes available. Last Friday, I activated a couple Parks on the Air sites with a friend using his Yaesu FT-857. After parting ways for the day, I intended to activate a few more parks with my Elecraft KX2. I was surprised when my KX2 would not tune the EFHW I brought with me. The best it could do was 25.4:1 SWR on the 20m band. Normally this tuner can handle anything and I was feeding it a resonant antenna, minimal tuning required. I tried swapping feedlines on the EFHW, no luck. I tried disabling the tuner, reenabling the tuner, no luck. I tried swapping feedline, again no luck. I tried pulling the EFHW out of the tree and putting up a linked dipole, still no luck. Unfortunately I didn’t have a backup radio and was running short on time and decided to pack it in. ...

I was licensed in late 2018 and got on HF for the first time in 2019. Since then, I have been on the air a lot with FT8, CW, and SSB. I digitally log (i.e. no paper) FT8 QSOs, contest QSOs (too many), and POTA activation QSOs. I do paper-log POTA hunter contacts, DXpedition contacts, and casual QSOs. This past weekend I converted two ARRL logbooks worth of QSOs to a Google spreadsheet, and then converted that to an ADIF file for upload to Logbook of the World (LoTW). I used ChatGPT for both of these conversions. LLMs are very good at processing textual data for pattern-matching and identifying anomalies. My Google spreadsheet only had ~1100 rows, so this seems like a reasonable task for an AI service’s free tier. ...

Radioteletype is mode of communication consisting of a “mark” and “space” tone that can be transmitted over ham radio frequencies. The tones can be visualized as “crossed ellipses” shown below. This write up describes how I set up my station for operating in the 2025 CQ WW RTTY contest. NOTE: I unsuccessfully attempted to use the WinKeyer USB (WKSMT, firmware 31.03) with N1MM and the FTDX10. N1MM could key the radio, 100W was measured on the tuner’s power meter, but no tones came out per the Scope & FFT displays on the FTDX10. My understanding is that N1MM should send ASCII characters to the WinKeyer and the WinKeyer should emit the proper FSK waveforms. A problem for another day/contest. ...

A friend recently purchased a DMMCheck Plus and let me take it home for some testing. This device provides a known DC voltage, AC voltage, four resistances, four capacitances, four inductances, and two frequencies that you can compare your instruments against. This was a great chance to check the accuracy of my DMMs, 2 of which I acquired second-hand. When is it useful? It outputs a single voltage and single current measurement. It will not test all the ranges of your multimeter. ...

I spent most of the weekend of January 25-26 at Morrow Mountain State Park in Stanly County, just east of Charlotte. Saturday morning started with teaching a few chapters of Technician license manual at the RARS Tech class. Once that wrapped, I went home for a quick equipment costume change, picked up John K4EB, and we were off to the state park for the weekend! Our plan was for John to enter Winter Field Day (WFD) and I would enter the CQ World Wide 160m CW contest. When the 160m contest slowed down, I would jump over to Winter Field Day. By the end of the weekend, we would both put the brand new Pinecone Amateur Radio Club on the air in its first contests. All contacts made would also count towards our Parks on the Air totals. ...