Ham Finder 1.0 release!

For the last few months, I've been working on a project, which I just released to the world today. I haven't wanted to say much about it until I managed to get it released, but as it's now out there, I figured I'd let it go!

The project is named Ham Finder. Essentially, it's aim is to be the ultimate tool to assist the mobile amateur radio operator. I have a whole bunch of things planned for it, but the tool itself is simple, and for the moment, focused on the US. That isn't to say that it won't work outside of the US, but functionality will be somewhat limited outside of the US for now.

Here's an example output of the tool. For the purpose of testing this, I spoofed the location to the White House. It shows the lat/long, grid square, county, and more.

For another example, see this view from Arlington. Note that it also gives the DXCC, the prefix (K4), and other relevant information.

For the future, as mentioned, I have quite a few planned upgrades. There isn't a whole lot that I'll commit to at this moment, but I will promise that shortly the capability will exist to get the data offline, and remove ads, for a small price. In addition, I'm hoping to improve the logging system considerable, and export to ADIF, and possible other formats as well.

If you could be kind and give me feedback on this app, I'd love to hear from you! I really am hoping to make this an awesome program, and I appreciate all of the help in knowing where to take it!

ARRL Sweepstakes

This past weekend, I participated in the ARRL Sweepstakes. Just thought I'd share my results.

• 45/50 states worked, including all required for WAS!
• 59/83 ARRL sections worked
• 120 QSOs
• 14400 points

With only spending a few hours, I was able to do pretty well. I managed to get the states I needed for Worked All States (WAS), and picked up quite a few new band/states to boot. All in all, it was a pretty successful adventure, and a fun time! As of yet, I haven't achieved WAS yet, but I'm just waiting on a few last states that I picked up during the contest. Hopefully it'll work out soon!

Communicating when the Worst Happens

I've been told the two key things to manage in the event of a disaster are communications and logistics. Ham Radio Operators are very well practiced in the Communications site, and in fact, often run the communications systems for public events, as a practice for when it is required for a real emergency. Thus, with your Amateur Radio License, you can help out with such events in a very real way, assisting to save lives!

Preparing for a Lack of Phones

In today's busy world, in constant communication, it seems like cell phones are available everywhere. The truth is, they are highly available, but they do have their issues, whether climbing mountains, major disasters, or traveling to remote areas, there will be a time where you don't have constant communications with the world through phones and cell phones. What do you do then?

Figuring out the Master Band Plan

Now that I've started to go digital, one of the key things is to figure out the digital band plan. I have plans to eventually do something really neat with this, but here's a rough idea of what the band plan is for Digital modes. I'm going to focus on 20m, as most of them are similar to it, and include the links for the other information.

At the highest level is the FCC rules:

14.000-14.150 MHz- Digital Modes (CW included)
14.150-14.350 MHz- Analog Modes (SSB included)

The next level seems to be the ARRL band plans, which are actually quite complete for VHF+, but seem to lack a bit in the details for HF bands:

20 Meters (14.0-14.35 MHz)

14.070-14.095	RTTY
14.095-14.0995	Packet
14.100	NCDXF Beacons
14.1005-14.112	Packet
14.230	SSTV
14.286	AM calling frequency

The next level down is CIARC, which provides some really good detailed information on digital modes, but is still a bit lacking.

Mode	Specific	Dial Freq	Center Freq	Offset
PSK31		14.07	14.07015
Olivia	Olivia 16/500	14.073.65	14.0744	750
Olivia	Olivia 32/1000	14.1055	14.1065	1000
JT65		14.076
Olivia	Olivia 16/500	14.07765	14.0784
Olivia	Olivia 32/1000	14.1055	14.1065
Olivia	Olivia 32/1000	14.1065	14.1075

The ultimate band plan seems to be bandplan.com, but this has a bit too much detail, including nets, etc.

I'm going to put together a master band plan, that includes everything I can find, and piece it together here. Hopefully it will be of some use to the community out there!

Working JT9/JT65

In my working with digital modes, I have started with JT9/JT65. I've found them to be rather relaxing modes, you can easily do something else while you are talking, and just get back to the conversation every two minutes. I'm hoping to give a bit of an idea of how these two modes work, and what should be done to improve communications on the subject.

Mobile setup

One of the things I noticed early on about 2m is that the majority of the people using it seem to be traveling when they are using it, except for things like nets. After a while, I started to wonder how I could get involved with the same thing. Eventually, I got my set up figured out, and let me explain it here, along with some of my future goals in the matter.