I recently wrote to the senators and congressmen for my area about the BPL issue and how it pertains to amateur radio and the current bill going through both the Senate and the House, Emergency Amateur Radio Interference Protection Act. Below is the only personalized response I received.

Ok so...yeah....I should have posted this stuff a long time ago. I finally snapped some pictures of the J-Pole AE5IR and I built, you can see them here. I recently redid most of the joints with solder vs plumbers goop. I seem to have done a decent job once I figured out that my small butane torch takes a bit to heat the copper to the proper temperature to get the solder to flow correctly.

As expected my vanity application was approved, still think the 18 waiting period to allow people to mail applications is silly, but still got the call I wanted woot!

Also Ham Holiday is coming up, one of the bigger hamfests in Oklahoma. I hope to find a good deal on a nice HT while there and meet some local hams since I am new to the community. Also AE5IR will be coming up to stay a whole and will be attending as well, he is going to offer his help as a VE to the ARRL team that will be doing the testing session there.

73 de N5THX ex KE5UKH

I know there are a lot of hams on twitter that I follow, but with it's downtime(bleh), closed source (bleh), and an ton of features that are always screwed up I jumped on www.identi.ca today and it is so far pretty good for being open to the public for one day, it is feature lacking at the moment, but guess what? It's FOSS! Anyone can download the source and help out the project and make it better for everyone. This is one aspect of ham radio that has always appealed to me, how similar it is to the FOSS world. Check it out and while your there, follow me! www.identi.ca/palintheus

FIRST HF CONTACTS EVAR!!!

Went to the South Canadian Amateur Radio Society (W5NOR) FD setup hoping to talk to a few people and observe, what happened was that one of the seasoned members through me onto the phone station on 20m, I was nervous at first, but overcame it and wound up making about 40 contacts in an hour. Hopefully I can get a copy of the paper log section from when I was working, would really like to have a record of my first HF contacts, even if it was under the club call ;P

did I say w00t yet?

I applied for my vanity callsign yesterday and paid for it today. So now I get to wait the mandatory 18 days to see if anyone mails in an application and then they process it. Hopefully in a couple weeks it will be approved.

WHEW! After about a month of inconsistent studying I passed Element 4 to receive my amateur extra class, I finally took the test tonight and passed! de KE5UKH/AE :D

So, I've been studying for the extra test the past 2 weeks or so, and I'm trying to pass it on the last local VE test session date before the exam pool changes. I'm currently on the 4th section, and averaging a section every 2-3 nights. Once I have a section down I start at one and go through them all up to the last section I've reviewed. Wish me luck!

73 de KE5UKH

Bringing you another addition to the realm of CQtopia. I just created an IRC channel on Freenode for members and visitors of CQtopia to hang out in.

Channel Name: #cqtopia
Network: irc.slashnet.net

If you don't have an IRC program installed you can click the link to be taken to mibbit, an online access to IRC all you have to do is pick a nick and click connect.

Take me to the channel!

Come and Chat!!!