The new year often gives us a chance to look forward and backward on your hobby and decide what to do more or less of in the upcoming year.
With the pandemic, I’ve been staying close to home, though surprisingly with less free time than I expected.
In the last year I had a chance to get my shack-in-a-box/gokit to a pretty good place. I’m able to listen to HF or VHF/UHF anytime I want and have made more QSOs in the last year than ever before. That said, the bands have be pretty dead and my ability to talk on HF has been limited to SSB with the Pacific North West and some FT8 and JS8call.
On VHF/UHF I’m continued with my weekly simplex net (9+ years running) and some other local use (listening to 146.52 calling frequency, some other simplex and club nets) I wish there was a better database of nets to make it easier to find and join them!
I spent a few months setting up a SatNogs satellite receive station for the NOAA and other satellites. I had a comprise antenna (a 137 MHz v-dipole IN THE HOUSE) but still had a really good time getting some decent decodes of the NOAA weather satellite images. I’d love to rebuild a v2.0 of this antenna and receive station and get the antenna outside. I had to take this setup down due to needing the space for another project.
I’ve done a little elmering / mentoring of new hams through the SFFD NERT program which is always rewarding.
I’ve continued with some limited APRS and old school packet BBS use.
In the last year I’ve had a nice time building out a set of AREDN nodes and hooked them into the SF network.
I’ve only had a limited chance to do any traveling or camping but when I’ve done I’ve either taken my VHF/UHF HTs with me, or in a couple times taken my ft-817 and end fed. I’ve had no luck with QRP SSB when camping unfortunately. I spend 99% of my travel time talking on FRS with the family!
I often bring my WLD KD-C1 16 channel radio with my when I’m out and about. It’s programmed with 446 simplex and then “best’ 15 other repeaters for the Bay Area.
My 2021 plans
I plan on keeping my AREDN network up, and possibly adding some services to it like a Raspberry Pi and may one some emergency power for at least one of the nodes.
I’m temped to move the location of my shack to the back of the apartment to get me better antenna location and get me further from the access point which has been resetting too much when I transmit!
I’d like to have a more permanent HF and VHF SDR set up. I’ve been careful to not have my SDR set up when I transmit on the HF and VHF station but it would be nice to have a panoadapter view of HF and VHF
My HF digital set up lives in a backpack, I’d like to have a permenent setup with fewer cables. It’s a rat nest right now (3 USB cables to get on HF and VHF!)
I’ve seen people have good luck putting a Raspberry PI in that rack and then VNCing into the rpi. This will definitely cut down on cables, though at the cost of network complexity and possibly impacting my power budget and complexity. If I end up moving the rack I’ll definitely embed a rpi for remote access!
The other thing I’ve done is get rid of a lot of radio projects I just was never going to get around to. I passed along my external HF tuners (I regret getting rid of both though!) and I got rid of all my 2Ghz HSMM gear. I had thoughts about setting up a 2GHz access point to my AREDN portable node, but I just have too many things on my plate.
Things I probably won’t be doing this year
I really wish I practiced my CW more, especially with the bands being so bad. I’ve always wanted to be able to being a super small QRP CW rig and antenna while camping. I just haven’t heard enough to get in good practice, though a local club has started doing 2m CW…..
I probably won’t finish my Pixie 2 QRP rig until I get some consistency good HF conditions, it’s too hard to know if its working right now and I want to get it perfect before I mount it in an altoids case, etc…
I had a couple radio software projects I was kicking around but they have taken a back seat for now. I hope to get one done and in the App Store before the end of the year though!
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