From the Mind of Trevor Stone

Amateur radio operators are probably the only folks who regularly use Morse code in the 21st Century. Long distance communication today generally happens by voice or digital data; and often voice encoded as data. Militaries stopped training radio operators in Morse code. The final US telegram was sent in 2006; in India it was 2013. Britain's service ended in 1981. Those articles report that in 1920, Western Union charged 5 cents per word (when a nickel was worth something) and the Royal Post Office charged a penny per word, with an exchange rate of about 3 pence per nickel. Back when phone plans didn't just bundle unlimited SMS, it seemed 5 cents (at 2005 value) was the going rate… with space to fit about 20 short words. And anyone with access to the Internet has been able to send thousands of words for free via e-mail for more than three decades.

A couple things keep the dits and dahs of Morse code flowing on the amateur radio airwaves. One is tradition: it's a hobby stereotypically practiced by old dudes, and they had to demonstrate Morse code proficiency to get their license (prior to 2007), so there's a comfortable feeling to it, even if they're not banging out the QSOs with a Vibroplex bug on a Hallicrafters solid-state transmitter.

But it's not just nostalgia that keeps Morse code alive. There are practical advantages to Morse and Continuous Wave. CW puts all the transmitter's power into a narrow bandwidth which is either on or off, and the duration of those emissions create the code pattern. This makes CW ideally suited for low-power long-distance transmissions, also known as "weak signal". While clear-channel AM broadcasters used 50 kilowatts to carry Art Bell's voice across the Great Plains, Art as ham operator W6OBB could have conveyed a message just as far with a one or two watt CW signal. It would've taken a lot longer to relay the caller's story about an alien abduction, though. The AM signal spends half its power on the carrier wave, and the other half is split between two identical modulated waves above and below the carrier frequency, spreading out 5 kilohertz in each direction. The CW signal fits in 100 hertz or so, so it's more like a laser pointer than like a lightbulb.

That narrow bandwidth also means the receiver can listen with a really tight filter. Lower-frequency radio bands often have a lot of static; for an example listen to your AM radio during a summer night with a lot of thunderstorms, or listen to the 75 meter band almost any night of the year. (If you enjoy eavesdropping on colorful characters, the latter offers hours of free entertainment.) The wider the bandwidth of the receiver, the more atmospheric static you'll get in your audio signal and the harder it will be to hear what anyone's saying. But with a CW filter that's only a few hundred hertz wide, you can pick out enough of the dits and dahs to understand the transmission.

Finally, the technology for a CW radio transmitter is about as simple as you can get. A straight key or an iambic paddle closes an electric circuit to send a signal; releasing the lever opens the circuit to stop transmitting. The rest of the circuitry doesn't need to modulate or demodulate the signal, so a student or tinkerer could conceivably start from scratch and end up with a working radio. The cheapest CW transceiver kit I've seen is $15 (but it doesn't have the ability to change frequency). And any mechanism you can think of to complete a circuit can be made into a CW key. (I'm interested in trying the QLF sewing machine pedal, and the nail clipper key should be quite portable.)

I realized the value of CW when I was preparing for a trip to Hawaii. It took a lot of work to pull off ten single-sideband (2.5 kHz bandwidth) contacts in two hours with a 45-watt amplifier, since it's 2500 miles to California. I realized I could probably have lightened my load and still pulled off the activation with a 5 or 10 watt radio and morse code. I even got a light-weight paddle and spent time on the airplane with a Morse code tutor. I didn't end up sending any CW from the island, which is probably just as well… I might have been able to copy at five words per minute.

Last year I set a Parks on the Air goal of making at least one CW contact with each activation. I definitely didn't hit the "every activation" goal (particularly in the fall and winter months when I preferred keeping my gloves on to hit the mic's PTT button), but I did manage to make over 133 CW contacts from more than 20 parks. Sunday evening POTA activations also proved a good opportunity to participate in the weekly K1USN SST slow-speed CW "contest". I was pretty reliant on a decoder app, but I could reliably send at 12 to 15 WPM and a healthy Farnsworth spacing. I can recognize my own WT0RJ callsign by ear with no problem, and CQ SST stands out quite clearly. Visually following the app makes it hard for me to also focus on listening, so recently I've taken to tuning to a station calling CQ, getting their callsign from the app, and then waiting until I can pick out all the characters by ear before responding.

I've also recently gotten a chance to be hands-on with the hardware side. Last year at a hamfest I bought both a Brown Bros CTL-B combined paddle and straight-key crafted in the late 1970s (photo) and a light-weight 3D printed paddle kit made my a local ham. The former doesn't have an output jack, just screw terminals. This February I finally got around to taking it to my office's maker space to wrap three wires around the terminals and inside a 3.5mm jack. The hefty base and hard plastic paddles make for a noticeably different feel when operating. I need to experiment with the screws to find my ideal motion range, but it definitely feels more precise. A few weeks ago I also finally got around to constructing the 3D printed kit. I almost screwed it up by soldering too long a tip on the short wires, but I managed to route everything in the box without impediment. For a base I picked up a very thin sheet of steel which seems to stay with half sitting under a radio, so I can stick the magnetic feet to it and keep the paddle from sliding all over the place while I swipe left and right to call CQ.

Now I've got all the technology, I just need to make time for dedicated practice…

2024 was my second year of frequent participation in Parks on the Air, a ham radio activity that involves setting up a radio and antenna in a state or national park, talking to people around the country and sometimes internationally, and earning fake internet points. I once again managed to do multiple activations each month and hit a few fun milestones.

I operated from 36 parks from 23 counties in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Washington, DC. (I also joined two clubs in Virginia for Field Day.) In addition to over 3,000 contacts with stations in the mainland U.S. and Canada I talked to people in Australia, Barbados, Brazil, Ceuta, Chile, Dominican Republic, Easter Island, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Martinique, Mexico, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Spain, Sweden, Venezuela, Alaska, Hawaii, and boats and planes over the ocean. I made at least three contacts with every state and DC, and finally got a park-to-park with Rhode Island to fill the 51st slot on Worked All States. I made a park-to-park with every state but North Dakota and every Canadian province but Newfoundland and the territories in the north. And clever county-line positioning allowed me to get a pretty wild number of fake internet points in the West Virginia and Colorado QSO Parties.

On a trip to Hawaii in 2023 I realized the benefit of CW for weak-signal long-distance radio communication, so I set a 2024 goal of getting good enough at Morse code to make at least one CW contact with each POTA outing. I didn't stick to this practice in the latter part of the year, partly because I was worried about how well I could operate a paddle with gloves on, but I did manage 112 POTA CW contacts, plus a handful of contacts from home or work in the K1USN weekly Slow Speed Contest.

CW operating also enabled me to work the 30-meter band, which doesn't allow voice or other wide-band modes. This in turn helped me to get about half way to the POTA N1CC award: 10 parks with contacts on 10 bands. 80 meters has been tricky there: the usually high noise floor means my 45 watt portable station is challenging to hear. I got a shortened vertical antenna for 80m for easy deployment in parks without good trees, but have only really been able to make good contacts when I can loft over a hundred feet of wire into trees. I got some arborist throw weights and proper slick ropes, which has worked a lot better than my original "eye-bolts on fishing line" that was remarkably good at getting tangled. I still use an adjustable vertical when I'm doing a quick activation—throwing a wire antenna over trees and getting it back down again at the end can easily add an hour of "not on the air" time to an activation. But when I've got both time and good trees, the elevated wire makes a significant difference in the number of contacts I can achieve. Shout out to the wide-branch deciduous trees in Arkansas and West Virginia: Colorado's ponderosa pines are a challenge.

Some stats, generally counting "2-fers" as a single contact:

Mode	Count
CW	112
FM	27
SSB	2943

Band	Count
80m	30
40m	500
30m	12
20m	1687
17m	223
15m	182
12m	114
10m	304
2m	22
70cm	8

My State	Count
AR	129
CO	2267
DC	12
KS	46
OK	59
WV	569

Unique	Count	Most common
Stations	2203	N6HU (12)
Parks	663	US-4559 & US-4572 (8 each)
Frequencies	433	14.242 (215)
States / provinces / regions	85	California (235)
CQ Zones	14	4 (1601)

As we hit the road, 7 day weather forecasts for the eclipse were looking dicey. The "raining all day Monday" forecast quickly turned to "partially cloudy all day," with a line of clouds along the eclipse path from the Rio Grande to the Ohio valley. We were committed, though, and set off to our campsite in Arkansas. "Pray to your favorite weather and sky gods," I said in my email to campers.

Weather in the Ouachita Mountains turned out to be fantastic. The first night was a bit chilly, but the rest of the week featured sunny days and a few high wispy clouds. It's refreshing to camp in a state that's damp enough to have a campfire without hypervigilance that you might burn down the whole forest. And as someone who's used to spending vacations on festivals or distant adventure travel, having a vacation with just a couple dozen people and no schedule of events was a nice change of pace. The night before the eclipse the forecast was still calling for "partly cloudy," with with wispy clouds that might still show the great gig in the sky. As the Earth turned to Monday we were greeted with completely clear skies, the sun perfectly visible through a clearing at our campsite. Jupiter also made an appearance, though we couldn't see the passing comet.

Many times during the two-year planning period for this adventure I was rather amused that I was driving a thousand miles on a two week adventure for a four minute experience. Totality was indeed pretty neat: "evening" came on quickly, then a dark sky with wispy solar promenances visible to the naked eye. Our position at the base of the trees didn't offer much of a views to the horizon, though I could see sunset hues in each direction. I would've loved to bask in the experience for an hour; between taking photos (a few of which turned out alright) and looking around to see what all was different I didn't get a chance to really tune into the eclipse vibes, man. Now that I've got a solar camera filter and I know solar binoculars are a thing I should spend more time just gazing at the sun.

In the days before the main event I hoisted two wire antennæ into the trees and managed to get the fake internet points award for making contacts on 10 amateur radio bands. I didn't actually make a lot of contacts, since I seemed to only call CQ on bands with poor propagation or nobody was listening. I did make a lot of park-to-park contacts—I wasn't the only one with the idea to have a radio campout for the eclipse—and made some very low-key contributions to science by participating in the Eclipse QSO Party before and after totality.

En route, I played ham radio on the Santa Fe Trail in Dodge City and the Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge. The former had a really high noise floor for some reason, maybe machinery at the agricultural processing plants. The latter was a lot of fun: we started by digging for selenite crystals that form a short dig below the crust of the salt basin. The radio waves liked the site as well; I had a steady pileup for most of an hour. Sea water helps HF propagation, and a field of salt with water a foot below the surface seems to have the same effect.

We spent a day in Tulsa visiting the Greenwood Rising center and the Woody Guthrie museum. Greenwood Rising opened 100 years after the Tulsa race massacre when a white mob burned down "Black Wall Street," the black neighborhood of Greenwood, one of the largest concentrations of black wealth in America. This is an incident that wasn't talked about as part of Americas history until recently. Despite attending a racially-conscious elementary school and using Howard Zinn's book as my first high school history text, I was unaware of the Tulsa race massacre until 2019. Greenwood Rising isn't just about the massacre, but does a good job creating a sense of the place before it was destroyed and what it meant to have a thriving black neighborhood on the other side of the tracks. Modern museums are big on interactivity, and Greenwood Rising does a good job of creating an immersive experience to enhance the educational goals. The Guthrie Center was also a good visit. I hadn't known that Woody was a prolific sketch artist, many with the same incisive yet accessible social commentary as his songs. I'd also thought the Dust Bowl was an extended dry period with poor farm soil care practices leading to the fertile land slowly blowing away. I hadn't realized that there was a specific day, Black Sunday, that blocked the sun and buried entire towns.

The big rain event that had all the eclipse chasers worried all week managed to hold off in Arkansas until about 10pm; enough time to pack up most of our camp and switch from the canvas tent to a dome tent, easier to wrangle when wet. And despite a wet night, the weather gods smiled on us again, pausing the rain in the morning so we could pack the final bits. We got to enjoy some lovely scenic pullouts along the Talimena National Scenic Byway. At the top I activated Queen Wilhelmina State Park at the top of the mountain while the clouds closed in to form a wonderfully liminal cloak. Despite the high elevation all my strong signal reports were coming from Georgia, a mysterious pipeline through the ionosphere.

On the way home we spent another couple days in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, capital of the Cherokee Nation. Subdivision of Cherokee land under the Curtis Act, along with many other factors, makes the Oklahoma nations feel a lot different than the Indian reservations folks in the U.S. west are used to. Tahlequah feels like an ordinary town where several parcels are owned by natives and the tribe. There are several good Cherokee museums and a casino, but everything else feels like a typical mid-sized American town in the southeast from fast food and barbecue restaurants to big ranch houses out towards the lakes. Funky res cars, res dogs hanging out in the shade, and the smell of frybread that you might imagine on a reservation in the southwest or on the plains doesn't show up in Tahlequah or elsewhere we saw among the five "civilized" nations.

North American eclipse hunters will have to head overseas for the next two decades, so I'm glad I made a trip out of it. The 2045 eclipse will pass right over the same campsite but I think I'll stay closer to home for that one since it passes across Colorado as well. I wonder how early Valley View will take reservations…

At the end of 2022 a Ranger friend gifted me a SuperAntenna, an adjustable vertical antenna which can operate on any amateur radio band from 40 meters to 70 centimeters and packs up into a small and portable bag. This friend knew I might be interested in this antenna because I'd organized a Parks on the Air (POTA) activity at the 4th of Juplaya which involved a fairly hilarious misadventure erecting an end-fed wire antenna on a telescoping mast at the edge of a flat and treeless desert. A ham radio operator might tell you that a vertical antenna with a loading coil is less efficient at radiating radio waves than a dipole half a wavelength above ground. This is true. But what I realized with the SuperAntenna is that you'll make a lot more contacts on an antenna that can be set up anywhere in 15 minutes than you will if you have to get a 33-foot wire 33 feet off the ground.

In 2022 I did POTA activations on two road trips, Arkansas and California/Nevada/Utah. They were fun, but I tended to spend an hour flinging fishing line and paracord into trees so I could get a wire antenna up in the air, and if it turned out the placement wasn't very good there wasn't much I could do about it. That long of a setup period meant a POTA activation Needing a tree or bringing your own tall pole also limits the parks you can set up in: out here in the western U.S. the tallest vegetation in many parks is a bush, or a delicate tree species the park rangers would rather you not tie things to. The amount of effort required meant I didn't get on the air much when I was back in Colorado. But having an antenna I can carry anywhere and quickly erect on a picnic table or parking lot meant I could play radio as a side activity for just about any trip, whether across the country or on the way to an evening event.

I got interested in ham radio in 2021 in part so I would have a hobby that didn't involve staring at a screen in my living room during the pandemic. Parks on the Air became a great excuse for me to get out of the house in 2023. My first activation of the year was on a great sunny Colorado day with six inches of snow on the picnic table. I'd visited Sawhill Ponds on several field trips in elementary school, but hadn't visited it much as an adult. Now I'm in second place for contacts from park K-9669 :-) Most of my operating was outside, though I would occasionally hide out in my truck in cold winds or intense rains. I activated parks in Colorado, Washington (DC), Virginia, Maryland, Wyoming, Nevada, and Hawaii.

Not including "2-fers" where an operator is in two parks at once, I made a little over 1600 POTA contacts in 2023 from 27 parks. I contacted 1240 different stations, including folks in Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Chile, Alaska, Hawaii, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Italy, and Sweden. Through park-to-park contacts I reached the "Worked all states" milestone with DC standing in for Rhode Island, which I still haven't worked. (Band conditions often aren't great between Colorado and New England, and by the time I'm awake, fed, out the door, and set up folks up there are often packing up to go home.) Including my outings in 2022 I've contacted 430 parks, with 520 park-to-park contacts. As an activator I've made 60 contacts on 40 meters, 1662 on 20 meters, 69 on 17 meters, 169 on 15 meters, 46 on 12 meters, 67 on 10 meters, 16 on 2 meters, and 3 on 70 centimeters (all of the latter going as far as the nearest parking lot :-)

All my radio contacts so far have been voice, but I now have a portable morse code paddle and straight key and am hoping to get enough code practice to make at least one CW contact during each activation (though I've already missed this goal on my New Year's Day 2024 activation :-) I'm also hoping to get back to throwing wire in trees in the right circumstances… like a camping trip to the national forest. For all that I love the quick setup of the SuperAntenna, its bandwidth on 40 meters is pretty narrow and it seems silly to get the extensions for 60 and 80 meters with even more coil fussing when changing frequencies. I've also yet to make 6 meter contact, and my with my IC-705 and the Beam Spinners group I should be able to have some fun with long-distance SSB contacts on VHF and UHF. I should be able to pick up a few more towards "Activated all states" en route to the eclipse in Arkansas and maybe as a side quest after lobbying Congress.

Some time in May I looked at my calendar and realized that every weekend in June was spoken for, and that July and August were looking pretty tight. This led to yet another summer where most of my free time has been spent either having fun away from home or preparing for said fun.

The first weekend in June was Untamed a pagan gathering in its second year, led by some of the core people from the now defunct Beltania event. It featured workshops, rituals, craft vendors, neo-highland games, a day of music performances, and drum circles. And rain. Lots of rain. It's been a wet year in Colorado, so I was expecting a wet and chilly event, and it definitely delivered. I wound up sleeping in tights plus two pairs of pajama pants, hiking socks under mucklucks, a T-shirt under a long-sleeve shirt under a sweat shirt, and a winter hat. I think the cold and damp helped the drum circles find some really neat rhythms and reflective grooves, and everyone had the good sense to bring drums that wouldn't detune too bad in the damp air. There was also a ham radio Parks on the Air event that weekend, and since the festival property is right next to the Pike National Forest I hung a wire antenna in the trees on the other side of the fence and made some contacts while keeping dry in my tent. Unfortunately, after I'd made a bunch of contacts around the 20 meter band and started to call for people to contact me ("calling CQ") my high-end radio from the early 1990s suddenly got stuck in transmit mode and I noticed a distinct electronics smell. The problem persisted when testing at home where it was warm and dry, so I've got a circuit board investigation project to do when I get a free weekend. Which will maybe be October? November. Sheesh. At least the maker space at my office should be back up and running by then.

As soon as I got home I had to unpack the truck, start packing suit cases, and plan two lobby meetings for CCL's return to Capitol Hill. Kelly and I flew out Friday and stayed with a friend's parents in northern Virginia. Spending three days at an in person conference is so much more invigorating than a day and a half of a virtual conference via Zoom has been. And I love "magical hallway conversations" that emerge; I ran into people from the Before Times that I didn't even know would be there, had some great conversations with folks I knew I'd find. Even the thirty second connections with folks are so much better than a Zoom breakout room. I also took advantage of the conference hotel's location next to Rock Creek Park to do a Parks on the Air activation with a small radio and portable antenna I brought. Band conditions were challenging and it's hard to get a lot of power from a small radio but I managed to secure enough contacts for the activation to count. While I was at the conference on Saturday, Kelly went to DC Pride and got into a bit of good trouble, engaging in "lawful annoying" peacockery to establish a perimeter in front of the homophobic street preacher who probably makes money suing people who punch him for being an obnoxious jerk.

Our day lobbying Congress was great. In the past we've been very focused on putting a price on carbon emissions. This is the most effective available solution to fighting climate change, but it's a topic that has trouble gaining traction in some Congressional offices due to their philosophical outlook or the political climate in their district. This year we had carbon pricing and clean energy permitting reform as dual focuses with the meeting lead and member liaison choosing the topic that's the best fit for the office. This seemed to work quite well; we had some great conversations with offices where we've previously received a tepid response, and a lot of members were quite excited to see us. I was even involved in literal magical hallway discussion: a member was in a committee meeting all day, but really wanted to meet with CCL, so her staffers took us down the elevator and around the building where we had a ten minute conversation on a whole bunch of topics before their scheduler dragged them back in to mark up a bill. I also had the honor of leading a half-hour face-to-face meeting with Senator Hickenlooper who's been a big supporter of both carbon pricing and clean energy permitting reform.

We took advantage of the CO2 expenditure of flying to Washington DC to take a small vacation around the Chesapeake Bay region. Our first leg took us to Williamsburg Virgina by way of the Edgar Allen Poe Museum in Richmond, in part so we could pet the resident black cats. We checked into a B&B where all the rooms were themed after a U.S. president, ate some amazingly delicious mussels steamed in a chorizo sauce, walked down Colonial Williamsburg's Duke of Gloucester Street at sunset (good historic architecture vibes, cool fireflies, and reduced chaotic energy from tourist hordes). The next day we visited both Jamestown historic sites. The State of Virginia and the National Park Service both run a site focused on the first English settlement in the U.S. and its interactions with the native people. The State-run one is significantly more tourist-oriented, featuring people in period dress engaging in 17th Century crafts, recreated sailing ships (there was much quiet singing of I'm On A Boat"), and a folk park style buildings recreating Powhatan buildings and the Jamestown Fort. The National Park version is more of an archaeological site than a folk park, though it does have a working recreation of the Jamestown glassblowing site. The site is also quieter, with more of a chance to connect with the landscape and the James River, giving something of a sense of how the settlers and Indians might have experienced the place. (For one, the English woolen clothing must've been incredibly uncomfortable in June.) We finished the evening with another Parks on the Air activation from a small strip of sand at the edge of James Island. I was able to contact Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and attracted a hunter from Spain which felt pretty good for a 15 watt radio.

After a fun crossing of the Chesapeake Bay bridge and tunnel we spent the weekend in Maryland's eastern shore. The book themed B&B with a charming English hostess was much more our style. We'd hoped to take a canoe around Janes Island but the wind speed would've made paddling too difficult so we hung out at a picnic table coloring and playing ham radio. Band conditions were awful due to a geomagnetic storms, so getting the needed ten contacts for an activation took two hours. We then enjoyed a delicious crab cake lunch and then listened to Seldom Scene at the Crisfield Bluegrass Festival we didn't know was happening.

On the way back to NoVa we visited the Harriet Tubman Museum, a fairly new state park and national monument that does a really good job sharing and contextualizing Harriet Tubman's life and slavery in the mid-19th Century. Throughout the trip I was impressed with the care taken by museum curators to feature the slavery and Indian parts of the stories in meaningful ways, far beyond a token land acknowledgment.

The fourth weekend of June was ARRL Field Day when ham radio clubs across North America set up a temporary station and fill the airwaves with contacts. I've been in California for the last two Field Days, so I was excited to be able to check out the great setup the Boulder Amateur Radio Club does at Betasso park west of Boulder. I'd intended to set up a tent and operate into the late shift of this 24-hour event, but I realized that the generator would make falling asleep quite challenging and opted to get one Saturday night of the month in my regular bed. Sunday was spent recovering from the month that was, and mowing the grass that had been going bonkers from all the rain this year.

The Fourth of July long weekend brought Dead and Company to Folsom Field on their final tour. The shows were sold out or close to it, but I was able to find some spots with enough room to dance a bit. There were some really good performances, including some stellar drums & space, but I was a little disappointed with the set list. I think they only played two songs that premiered after 1979 (Standing on the Moon and So Many Roads). I knew they weren't likely to play any Pigpen or Brent Mydland songs, but it would've been great to hear something from the '80s like Tons of Steel or Throwing Stones or bring out a song that left the repertoire after the '60s like Viola Lee Blues. We also got a cat on July 1st (we'd been targeting this month for cat adoption for quite some time), so all my non-Dead energy for the weekend went into making the house safe and comfortable for a feline.

I spent the next couple unstructured weekends preparing for Burning Man. Given the amazing heat last year and the likelihood of wild and wacky weather from El Niño this year, I want to up my shade game so I have a hope of sleeping a little longer. I decided to drape a large piece of aluminet over two military surplus camo net poles, forming something of an A-frame. My ability to visualize objects and then make that imagined plan meet reality isn't one of my strong suits, so hopefully a test run of this shade structure will go well at Dragonfest (where shade that lets rain in isn't a huge win, but when else am I going to have time to try it?). I spent the final July weekend at a Ranger training campout near Ward. This was great fun, including the drinking-and-joking-around-the-campfire session, but its late season timing means I've got one less Burning Man prep weekend, and don't get a full weekend to prep for Dragonfest. Fortunately "camping in Colorado with a bunch of Pagans" is packing I can do without too much thought. I'm quite glad I decided not to go to the Ranger command team training the previous weekend, otherwise I'd have all the info for Burning Man and none of the actual necessary stuff.

August's weekend lineup features Dragonfest, then Pack For Burning Man Weekend, then Burning Man Opening Weekend, then Man Burn Weekend, then Get Home, Unpack, And Fall Asleep Weekend. That's usually followed by Clean The Dust Off All Your Stuff and then, wouldn't you know it, it's autumn equinox and time to do some kind of anniversary/birthday weekend getaway.

Yeesh. Maybe one of these years I'll spend a summer just hanging out.

I spent several weeks in June and July on a road trip to California and back. Covid uncertainty means "drive around and camp" has significant advantages over "fly and hotels." If you get sick before you leave, cancelation is releasing a couple campsites and you get to save money on gas. If you get sick while traveling you can either sit in a camp chair in the woods feeling lousy for a few days or drive home early. So last year I decided to visit my brother and a friend on the west coast and check out the Fourth of Juplaya, an annual event where a bunch of Burners go to the Black Rock Desert and do things you can't do at Burning Man.

This year my sister-in-law suggested we take my nephew on his first camping trip. In mid-February I booked what I think was the last available coastal campsite between the Bay Area and Mendocino County for the last week of June, which feels like one of the more absurd facets of modern life. "What will the weather be like in five months? Will we still feel like going there? Does our tent even fit? I hope that part of California won't have burned down by the time we get there."

Plans didn't change, so we headed westward as planned. We stayed the first night in an old hippy bus at Mystic Hot Springs, where we had to book a 2-hour soaking window in advance. This felt like an even more absurd aspect of modern life. "Schedule your bath time weeks in advance!" We spent the following night at a campsite outside Mammoth Lakes, which I was glad to see could be reserved on a Sunday night with just a few days notice. Driving through Yosemite before 4pm also requires an advance timeslot booking. These were sold out, but we had a grand ol' time dawdling at Mono Lake and the Upside Down House and Mono Basin museum that we cruised up Tioga Road at a leisurely pace in the late afternoon.

We spent a few days with two friends, two kids, and two cats in too-hot Fresno. We made paintings, cut solstice decorations out of construction paper, went swimming, played monsters for kids to attack, and ate garden-fresh produce. I think these kids will be alright. Then off to the Bay Area, hugging a bag of ice across the Central Valley because my car's AC wasn't working. In San Jose we tried to help with the chaos of a toddler, an anxious dog, and two working parents, with perhaps a modicum of success. I also led a Colorado congressional lobby meeting from a California back yard.

Salt Point State Park didn't burn down in the five months since making a reservation. I discovered that our site had a large tree stump in the middle, making the placement of our 10'x14' canvas tent that must be staked down lest it fall on your head a tight dance of geometry. The weekend was overcast and misty, as Northern California is wont to do, a welcome reprise from the 100° in the rest of the west. Our nephew had a grand time playing with trucks in the dirt and pushing his dump truck up and down the trails. My Mendocino County friends came down for a day with their toddler who was born the same week in 2019. The boys played quite well together, considering more than half their lives has been in the age of Safer At Home. I set up my ham radio and tried to join in on the fun of ARRL Field Day, but the only good tree options had my antenna running north-south and thus sending peak power west across the ocean or east right into the Coastal Range. I managed to make all of one successful contact; a few other folks in the Pacific Northwest could hear snippets but couldn't get my full callsign.

As I took the scenic California Highway 1 home a Point Reyes National Seashore police officer pulled me over and told me he was impressed that my license plate had been on my car so long that the letters had faded to the point of illegibility. I'd always assumed this was dirt that I didn't bother cleaning off, but upon later inspection I noticed that that the paint on the plate was starting to peel off. He told me to get replacement plates when I got back home but (foreshadowing) I don't actually need to worry about that problem.

Kelly flew home after the camping weekend to get back to work while I headed east towards the desert with my car and all our stuff. I opted to cross the Sierra Nevadas on highway 108, a lovely drive with a great overlook of Donnell Lake and a Stanislaus River valley. I spent the night at Buckeye Campground which had plenty of no-reservation-required campsites, probably on account of it being a Wednesday. I had significantly more luck with my ham radio setup, thanks to some fortunate band conditions. I talked to a guy in Mozambique via the gray line on 40 meters and a guy in France on 20 meters which is normally a "daytime band." In the morning I made some more Parks on the Air contacts, this time just in the U.S. The camp host noticed my setup and chatted for a bit, noting that another camper had also set up a ham radio antenna the previous night. I met him a little later, and then a third ham in the campground who didn't have an HF antenna up (he was fishing for Parks In The Water rather than broadcasting for Parks On The Air, I suppose). I then headed a couple miles downstream to Buckeye Hot Spring where I met two more ham operators and enjoyed a great soak. Buckeye might be the best side-of-a-cold-river hot springs I've had the chance to enjoy. I also checked out the nearby Travertine Hot Spring in its colorful geologic splendor.

Stay tuned for part two, where things stop going according to plan.

At the start of December I stopped by the local Ham Radio Outlet store when I was in Denver for a COVID shot. I picked up the ARRL study guide for the Amateur Extra exam, but told myself I wouldn't read it until after the holidays because I'd be spending unhealthy amounts of time on a coding challenge. We started the new year at Valley View, since a couple days soaking in a spring without access to a computer sounded very appealing. I brought the exam guide along for those moments that I was relaxing out of the water, and got as far as the start of chapter 4, when the electronics material really picks up.

My throat started feeling scratchy on my last day at Valley View, and it turned into an unpleasant week that felt like a rough cold. A fancy home COVID test a couple days in and another one at the end of the week both turned up negative, so maybe my immune system is just incapable of fighting off a cold after two years holed up in my living room. (Fun fact: coronaviruses are often causes of the common cold.) Since I didn't want to go out and infect anyone, and it was cold and snowy outside anyway, I spent most of my free time the next week and a half buried in the book. While the electronics part of the Technician and General exam felt like I was relearning things I forgot almost 25 years ago in Physics II, the Extra exam was full of electrical circuit material I'm pretty sure I'd never encountered before. Electricity and magnetism was my weakest subject in physics class; I did better with relativity and quantum mechanics than E&M, for some reason.

When I started studying, I didn't have a test date in mind; I figured I'd test once I finished and felt like I knew what was going on. But there was a tempting testing opportunity coupled with a hamfest in Loveland in the middle of the month, so I stayed up to 1am on Friday night to finish the exam guide and didn't have a chance to review the electrical topics that I was still hazy on. Come Saturday I got up early and made it to the Larimer County Fairgrounds by 9:30, which was quite a feat given the "crack of 11" mornings I'd been having during the week. I missed 9 of 50 questions, which is still a passing grade, though a little disappointing. On one of the missed questions I should've trusted my logical brain rather than thinking I'd seen the question in a practice test and picking the surprising answer. I think the other eight were all electronics related, ranging from misidentifying a diode from a circuit diagram to getting the phase pattern wrong across a capacitor and inductor in series. I should probably get an electronics textbook or find a good YouTube series.

Amusingly, I didn't use my General class privileges in the half a year I had that license before upgrading to Extra. A General license lets a ham transmit on portions the HF bands, which can cover the whole country and, in good conditions, the whole world. At HF, antennas get pretty big, so the convenient handheld VHF/UHF radio with a short antenna is no longer an easy way to get in. Additionally, every antenna involves tradeoffs, and many good antennæ work on a limited set of bands. I got stuck in a bit of analysis paralasys where I didn't know what bands I was interested in because I didn't have an HF radio, and I didn't have an HF radio because I didn't have an antenna, and I didn't have an antenna because I didn't know what bands I wanted to get on. Also, quality HF radios are pretty pricey: I got a top-end handheld VHF/UHF radio for about $400 last year, which is only about a third the price of the flagship HF radios from the "big three" Japanese manufacturers. That's a big chunk of change to drop without know if I'll be able to set up an antenna with good propagation in my backyard.

Now that my Extra studies were done, I turned my attention to figuring out a plan for a low-cost rig setup. My goal is to start with a portable station so that I can (a) use it as an excuse to get out of the house while still maintaining 146 Mhz 2 meters distance and (b) experiment with different antenna configurations before committing to something like attaching posts to my roof and hanging a dipole. Since software is a comfortable place for me, I started poking around the software-defined radio (SDR) space. I figure a card or USB device that can receive and transmit radio signals, plus a Raspberry Pi hosting a web UI that I can control with a smartphone would be a good platform for experimenting with radio from the software side. As luck has it, a ham in India has been working on an open source, open hardware, inexpensive kit called sBITX with HF radio circuitry, a Raspberry Pi, and a small touchscreen. It's still in development, but this might be an ideal entry point for me.

Rounding out a snowy month of amateur radio, the last weekend of January is Winter Field Day, inspired by the June ARRL Field Day but with the principle that emergency communication might be needed any time, so it's good to practice when it's cold outside. The Longmont Amateur Radio Club organized a Winter Field Day station in a building at the Boulder County Fairgrounds with two radios, one for 40 meters and one for 20. I showed up early and helped get the 40m antenna up, which involved tossing a small PVC pipe with a string over an evergreen tree, pulling stuck string out of tree branches, and holding on to the feedpoint to make sure the guy tightening the string to a distant tree didn't pull the antenna too far up the evergreen before we attached the coax cable. Ham radio involves some Physics I problems, not just Physics II :-)

Winter Field Day was actually my first chance to operate on HF bands, and I even got a chance to take advantage of the additional bandwidth provided to Extra class operators. The 40 meter band was challenging; I only managed to contact three other stations over the course of an hour, all in neighboring states, despite hearing clear calls from folks as far away as Kentucky. I think our antenna was a little too low, and coupled with the conductive snow-covered ground meant that we were getting takeoff angles close to vertical, so we could only get a couple hundred miles out. I later got to spend a little time with the 20 meter rig and racked up 7 contacts in about 20 minutes and helped log some more while another ham operated, reaching as far as Alberta and North Carolina. This was also a good opportunity to start learning what interface elements help be a smooth radio operator.

When communicating over a noisy voice channel, like a two-way radio or a poor phone connection, it's useful to using a spelling alphabet to make key words extra clear. While many people on the phone use the first English name that comes to mind ("P as in Peter, H as in Harold, O as in Olivia, N as in Nancy, E as in Eve"), the lack of a standard set leaves plenty of room for confusion ("was that Eve or Steve?"). Most radio protocols standardize on the NATO phonetic alphabet. But if you want to have a little fun, I've provided an updated alphabet that is just slightly out of tune.

Alfalfa
Bravado
Charlene
Deltoid
Eco
Faux pas
Gulf
Hostel
Indiana
Jeweled hat
Killer
Llama
Mic
No number
Otter
Popcorn
Québécois
Roaming
Sarah
Tangle
Unicorn
Victory
Whisked
X rated
Yanking
Zoro