Every year the confederation of loose cannons known as "Los Chupacabraderos" heads into the woods to compete in the ARRL Field Day. Fueled by venison and beer, we like to rough it and operate single transmitter, five watts power (QRP) on battery and … [Read more]
Tripping through Central Texas in a Westfalia VHF Rover
Several times a year the ARRL sponsors a VHF contest. This January my brother Kourt KB5PRZ and I decided to participate. Kourt recently acquired a Volkwagen Westfalia camper van, and we set about equipping it for VHF rover work in the "limited rover" … [Read more]
Live APRS activity in Austin
This is a live map of APRS activity, courtesy of aprs.fi: [raw][/raw] … [Read more]
Listen to live amateur radio in Austin
Listen live to Austin area amateur repeaters and Travis County and Austin police radio. These feeds run 24/7. The amateur radio feed scans through all known operational 6m, 2m, 1.25m, 70cm & 33cm repeaters in Austin, Williamson, Bastrop, and Hays … [Read more]
VHF contesting is a spectator sport
As attested by these onlookers at my backyard station. … [Read more]
Crowd-sourcing your repeater directory
In Texas, there are a lot of repeaters. About 1,642 according to what some consider a reliable source. Of those, many are "paper repeaters" in that they exist only in repeater directories. These venerable books remind me of the yellow pages -- one … [Read more]
Coverage map for 442.15 repeater
Here's a Longley-Rice coverage map for the 442.15 repeater in Austin. This was generated by a useful coverage map site. … [Read more]