Category: beer

Hampton, VA to Cleveland, OH

I left yesterday at about 10:20am, having done a poor job packing and generally having any semblance of organization. I ended up dumping a lot of extra stuff in a footlocker, piled everything in the backseat of the truck and headed out. Not more than a few feet out of the driveway I answered a CQ from Andy, W2QIQ. Andy has been a ham for 66 years (as opposed to my 6 years). He served in the Army during WWII in Europe, starting in Egland, making his way through France and ending up in Berlin.

My radio started acting up on 40M. I was using my Workman Hamstick tuned for the 40M phone band. The Icom AT-180 gets a good match right away bringing the SWR down to a 1:1. But then after I’m transmitting for about a minute, the Tune light flashes for about 10 or 15 seconds and then the Tune light shuts off and the power drops and SWR goes up. My first guess is that the radio and tuner need to have a better ground. But the matching impedance range for the AT-180 is only between 16 and 150 ohms, so that could be the problem. This is only a problem on 40M.

My TH-D7A APRS kludge seems to be working well when there is a digipeater. When I was on I-77N coming across the West Virginia/Ohio border, I accidentally pulled one of the power leads. I didn’t really notice it because all through the Smoky Mountains the APRS coverage was nonexistent. I got a few hits through Charleston, WV and then it (maybe) tapered off after Charleston or maybe I had pulled the power. When I was approaching Canton, OH, I knew something had to be wrong, because it was such a large area it would have to have a digipeater. That’s when I noticed the power was disconnected. I reattached the power and there was tons of APRS traffic.

Had some nice QSOs along the way: KL7GKY, EB7xx, YU1XA, and KB5YAY.

Post Christmas Wrap Up


Christmas was good to me. I received a NorCal 40A kit along with David B. Rutledge’s The Electronics of Radio. Together these items make up a basic analog electronics’s course and my hope is to build the kit and learn more about electronics and radio.

Notes from the budding brewmaster: The final bottles of my first batch of beer were actually quite good. It worked out to the following: 2 weeks in the keg, 2 weeks in the bottle, 3 days in the fridge. Very tasty. Also – I’m sticking to regular white sugar for the carbonation.

I’ve also been spending way to much time playing Age of Empires III on my laptop.

I need to get in the radio room, tidy up, catch up on logging in a stack of QSL cards, and prepare for Straight Key Night.

News & Notes

Last night I went out to the seawall at Fort Monroe to see if I could see the Space Shuttle Discovery as it headed away from the Kennedy Space Center towards it’s link up with the International Space Station. I was out on the fishing pier, scanning across the Chesapeake from Norfolk to Virginia Beach just before the launch time (2047 Eastern). I had my PRO-548 monitoring the 2M repeater up in Gloucester where WB7URZ, Randy, was giving out a running commentary of the launch to those of us trying to catch a glimpse “Main engine start, she’s on the way”. I was quite cold and the wind was strong, biting my ears and exposed fingers. Word was passed – Discovery was on her way. I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for…. a streak of light? Crackling over the scanner was Randy saying he didn’t see anything and another ham also saying he wasn’t see anything either. The wind was consistently sapping my internal heat… I saw lights from a helicopter, lights from aircraft… the stars… the constellation Orion was above Virginia Beach. I turned and started walking back towards the truck. Then I saw it…. a bright dot of light, moving from south to north about 10 degrees above the horizon…. moving fast! The scanner crackled, “I see, do you see it?!”… “Cool”… the bright dot continued it’s movement, flickered, and diminished in brightness. “She just dropped her external engines….” And across the horizon, getting fainter, the dot continued.

Other news… I tried my first bottle of beer from my first attempt at brewing. I had four bottles in the fridge that have been cooling, one I had added brown sugar, two I had added white sugar, and the last was half and half. I forgot to label what was what. I pulled out a bottle and brought it over near the sink. Wasn’t sure what would happen… would it explode with too much carbonation? I popped of the lid slowly… I could hear the carbonation being released. That was a good sign. It didn’t explode. I poured the bottle’s contents into a glass… it looked like beer. Light golden in color, slightly cloudy (like the book said). Not much carbonation. A little bit of bubbles on top, but not much. I tasted it. Cool, beer-like. But not quite right. I took the glass and sat down. I looked at the color… the color was good. I smelled it. Slight vinegar smell (which the book said meant that something got dirty during the process). It kind of had more of a hard cider taste. My guess is that this bottle had all brown sugar. I’m going to try another beer today and see if the experience is different. I also want to mix another batch of a different flavor and get it going.

Happy Thanksgiving!

(1) Home Brew: not talking about building an amateur radio project… talking about beer! I am the recipient of a Mr. Beer Deluxe Edition Home Brewery kit. Last week I completed the initial steps; mixed the wort with water and yeast. So now the batch has been fermenting for a week. I’m now waiting for my shipment of bottles so I can bottle this batch to complete the fermentation. I’ll probably experiment with the sugar types to see what that does with the flavor. I hope to be bottling by mid-week and then it should be about two more weeks before I get to start tasting the results.

(2) PRO-528: picked up the Radio Shack PRO-528 scanner. I got a USB programming cable and the Scancat Lite Plus software to program the scanner. I’ve loaded Hampton’s city frequencies for the police and fire, freqs for Langley Air Force Base, some 2m repeater freqs, and the FRS/GMRS freqs. So far, the scanner is working great.

(3) I got a QSL card from Hawaii! Just need my Alaska card for QSL for Worked All States.

(4) Model Rocket: fired off a model rocket on Saturday. Three times – all successful. The first launch with a B engine went pretty high, but the last two really took off using a C engine. The parachute worked well and the this is the first time I think I’ve ever returned home with a rocket (my other rockets being lost over fences, behind backyards, etc.). Of course that was all about 25 years ago. What I think would be fun is to build a rocket with a big enough payload that would carry a GPS and 2M transmitter to do APRS.

(5) Haven’t been on the air lately – I’ll try tonight.

This weekend….

Got to do a recon up to the Misty Mountain Campground where I’ll be headed over Labor Day. The journey should not be too difficult. The campground looks nice. Tucked at the base of the Blue Ridge, it is a shady, quiet place – small pool and shaded areas where the RVs are tethered to their power and water supplies. There was a ham RV in the camp, but I can’t remember his callsign. Nice Class A motorhome with a small vertical antenna mounted on the back.

I got another envelope from the QSL bureau! It had about 4 or 5 QSL cards from Belgium. One had the special “OO” callsign from last year’s anniversary celebration.

Received a letter from Tom, AA4TB, in South Carolina that I asked about setting up a CW sked. A regular CW sked would really help me out and get me on the air practicing CW. I need to reply to him.

Been sampling the Samuel Adams Brewer Patriot Collection. Four 12oz beers come in a box. The flavors are interesting: Traditional Ginger Honey Ale, James Madison™ Dark Wheat Ale, George Washington Porter® and 1790 Root Beer Brew™. Now, understand that I am usually an adventurous beer drinker… but the Root Beer Brew was not good. Tasted like a juniper bush and licorious placed in a vat of otherwise unimpressive beer. The George Washington Porter was pretty good, although I’m not a huge porter fan. I haven’t got to the other two flavors yet… we’ll see.

The rest of today – I need to clean up the shack (… and the rest of the house!).