HRN 452 ProMORE

/

As we’ve recently discovered (thanks to viewer ‘Cornbread’ in the YouTube chat), our ‘promos’ aren’t really ‘promos’ at all. They are ProMOREs. Because they are longer than most other shows… there’s more. Now the proMORE for HRN 451 was over three hours. That’s gonna be hard to duplicate. But despite David W0DHG’s prediction/request/protest at this beginning to this proMORE (and he kinda always tries that), we went over 90 minutes. And instead of tacking it onto the regular 452 episode, we’re giving it its own spot in the feed.

This is for Hardcore HRN fans only.

And we still don’t know what the Sunday show will be about. Apparently we don’t have to.

HRN 452 ProMORE poster with Gary, David and Jim

HRN 451: New Rig... Who Dis?

/

The ICOM ID-5100 was first released in 2015, 7 years ago. It’s still ICOM’s top-of-the-line dual-band D-STAR mobile rig. East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ just bought one to replace his 14-year-old ICOM IC-2820 (also a dual-band, D-STAR mobile), which was having trouble decoding D-STAR signals.

In this episode, Gary shows how he had to revamp his Q-Mobile’s control panel to fit the oversize control head of the 5100, then goes remote all the way to the garage (below the Studio in the Bonus Room) to demonstrate a few features (and issues) with the New Rig.

And so you may have noticed that this episode is only an hour and 15 minutes long. Are we welching on you guys? Not really! Earlier in the day, David and Gary did a 3-hour ‘PROMORE’ (a ‘promore’, apparently, is a new word invented to describe our extended promos that are often full-length shows themselves). You’ll find the Promore on YouTube and in the audio feed, just in case you need more… PROmore.

HRN 451 Episode Poster

PROMORE... A Three Hour Tour

/

It was time to do a promo for HRN 451, to be titled New Rig… Who Dis?. David W0DHG was driving home (LA) from San Francisco. Gary K4AAQ anchored from the Studio in the Bonus Room Above the Garage on the North Side of Fort Mill (SC), in the Shadow of Charlotte, at the Foot of Mt. Belzoni.

A little over three hours later, they were done… apparently only because David arrived home.

David was in SF to visit one of his daughters. While they were attending an event, David’s rental car (good gas mileage offset rental price) was broken into, and his backpack with a PC and his AnyTone HT (in the trunk, not on the seat, so the thief was onto that trick) were stolen. And a window was broken. So much for savings. Likely his 2007 Toyota FJ, bristling with antennae, would not have been so assaulted.

No, it doesn’t take three hours to tell that story, so clearly there’s more. Probably about 45 minutes of real entertainment, sadly embedded in 3+ hours of ‘show’.

Oh, and ‘PROMORE’? That may have been a typo in the chat, or it may have been deliberate. Anyway, it’s a new way to label our extended ‘promo’ videos.

WARNING!! A Zoom issue caused David’s end of the call to echo everything Gary said. Gary - hearing his own voice which he loves - was good with that. Gary’s wife Cyndi KD4ACW, said it was ‘very annoying’. This Website agrees with Cyndi. Listen at your own risk 👂🔈🔉🔊. It clears up toward the end, but only so you can hear what you should have been hearing all along, if only they had hung up on Zoom and reconnected.

HRN 450: 25 MIles

/

25 Miles comes from a fairly frequent Facebook inquiry from non-hams (usually) wondering how they might be able to communicate over X distance with some kind of radio technology when ‘All Else Fails’ - no cell phones, no Internet, no nothing (maybe sat phones… we didn’t think of that). The answer changes as you fill in the X with different distances, and 25 miles is sort of the limit with non-ham equipment (say, GMRS or CB), even with a decent (but not super-high or elaborate) antennas. Yes, the devil is in the many details. We discuss various distances (but forget about sat phones… it just doesn’t come up.

Then we talk about Ribbit, a new ‘technology’ for generating a text-based data signal on a smart phone that can be sent over a variety of medium - radio, VoIP - with ‘acoustic coupling’ - just holding the phone up to the mic and hitting ‘send’. It’s early days, and the technique may be a solution in search of a problem, but sometimes it works. They have a YouTube Video demonstrating the technology.,

Note that we had some trouble with our YouTube stream (again), and I’ve uploaded the recording to YouTube to avoid the buffering. Instead, you get a too-long discussion about the problem. Feel free to fast-forward (like you don’t do that already).

HRN 449: Extreme Elmering (almost a clickbait title)_

/

It’s just us - Jim NO1PC, David W0DHG and Gary K4AAQ for the Halloween Eve show. So, Extreme Elmering? We talk about that, after checking out Kyle AA0Z’s recent Trivia show, and a story in the LA Times about hams in Taiwan maybe preparing for a showdown with China.

And a reminder that when we do a ‘Promo’ show, it’s not just to tell you we have a ‘real’ show coming up. We usually do a whole ‘nother show. 30 minutes… or more. This week is defiantly in the more category. So if this nearly 2½ hour episode isn’t enough, to watch the Promo.

HRN 447: QBC*?

/

*Don’t look it up… you won’t find it. Host Gary K4AAQ and his friend Jeff AC4ZO (SK) made it up during some previous HamRadioNow show. QBC? means (according to them) “Are we in the middle of a Boring Conversation”?. And QBC (no question mark) means “We are in the middle of a boring conversation. Terminate immediately”.

BUT… that’s not what we talked about this week. We got a last minute guest: Kay Savetz K6KJN is the Program Manager, Special Collections at the Internet Archive, home of the Wayback Machine that has been collecting old websites since about the dawn of time.

Kay is charged with collecting pretty much any media about Amateur Radio that he can get people to send. With a loose definition of ‘media’. For example, if you have an old log book from your Novice days (like Gary does), Kay wants it. Plus podcasts, YouTube videos. Funded by a grant from ARDC.

If you have something to contribute, drop Kay a line at: kay@archive.org

LINKS:

HRN 447 Poster

HRN 446: Show What? (The UHF Simplex Epsidode)

/

We did it again - 4 minutes of silence at the top of the show before KE4TTS called to warn me.

With nowhere particularly to go, we (David W0DHG, Jim NO1PC and Gary K4AAQ) spent most of the show talking about an article in Field & Stream about the ‘Best Ham Radio’. Yes, Field & Stream.

The Promo video is Gary K4AAQ trying to scare some activity up on the HRN Discord while recruiting a live audience for the Sunday night show. This is for die-hard fans only.

HRN 445: Ian Overhead 🌀

/

We made up this title when the tropical storm remnants of Hurricane Ian were predicted to pass directly over the East Coast Studio (in the Shadow of Charlotte, at the foot of Mt. Belzoni). The track moved about 100 miles east and flooded Raleigh, instead. But of course, the serious devastation was in Cuba, Florida and coastal South Carolina.

We have our usual gang of hosts, Jim NO1PC, David W0DHG and Gary K4AAQ. And we’re joined by Christine Duez K4KJN, SEC for the West Central Florida Section, and Gordon Mooneyhan W4EGM, Public Information Coordinator for the South Carolina Section. Both were on the edge of the path that Ian took through Florida and South Carolina.

HRN 444: BEST! HAM Band of 2022 (a Clickbait title)

/

What is the BEST! HAM Band of 2022?

Just because that is a silly, unanswerable question that pokes fun at all the ham (and general media) BEST! lists that provide ample fodder for many, many (many) shows, that doesn’t mean we don’t give it a shot. And by the time we’re done, East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ unilaterally announces a winner!

Along the way, Gary, NorCal Host Jim NO1PC and West Coast Host David W0DHG are joined on the Zoom line by two live viewers: William K4ARX, and Kent N6WT. And the fun is in the journey, not the destination. We talk about a lot of stuff, some of it even useful.

HRN 443: TAPR DCC Review / Interop Drill

/

Another busy weekend…

David W0DHG was up on Missile Mountain doing an Interop Drill, while Gary K4AAQ was helping with the video from the 2022 ARRL/TAPR DCC, in his hometown this year. David and Jim get into the weeds on Emcom in CA

LINKS:



HRN 441: QRZ-1 Radio Followup

/

Two shows on the QRZ.com/GigaParts radio giveaway?

Yep. Well, East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ messed up a few things while trying to do the ‘no manual’ test of the radio last time. So now, post RTFM, he clears some things up. It’s a radio review like only HamRadioNow can do.

On board are West Coast Host David W0DHG and NorCal Host Jim NO1PC.

Also, a our previous episode on ‘It’s Not CW’ got pretty well raked over by comments on QRZ.com, so we rake back. Easy to do when you own the show.

And we ruminate on the need and potential future of a radio like the Icom 905. Jim gets to do a little rant.

HRN 439: It's Not CW (it's Morse Code) (a CLICKBAIT title)

/

This week’s lineup: Kyle AA0Z, David W0DHG, Gary K4AAQ. So yeah, we let Gary do his CLICKBAIT rant, where he also thinks it should be Morse’s code - that’s with an apostrophe s. We expect all hams to start using that.

Kyle gave a Huntsville Hamfest wrapup, we talked about the new ICOM IC-905 VHF to 10 GHz radio and that was more or less it (less, because we spent a long time talking about nothing in particular after that.

HRN Episide 439

TEST TEST TEST (not a show)

/

Another ‘not an episode’?

Well, we have a good reason for this one (but don’t we always?)

No Waiting

This time, East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ just got the new-to-us Wirecast computer up and running, and it was time to wring it out. Good news: it worked. Bad news: the Wirecast program doesn’t seem to use the second CPU. So it’s not helping as much as we expected. We’re looking into it.

Meanwhile, in this ‘not an episode’, West Coast Host David W0DHG is in New York City, where his daughter is competing in a Crossword Puzzle competition. David is a declared ‘non-combatant’, though he has a clear favorite in the event.

HRN 438: Leftovers

/

This is the show. It starts in a bit, but meanwhile, enjoy watching Gary’s fingers

East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ has been furiously… ok, intermittently… working on transitioning to the new Wirecast computer. He’s not quite done, but that left no time (he was willing to spend) on preparing for this show. So he and West Coast Host David W0DHG chatted for about 10 minutes and called it a night.

This is what we call the ‘promo’. It’s supposed to just tease the Sunday live show. We almost forgot to do that.

If you believe that, you’ve never watched this show before. On Saturday, the day before the Sunday live show, they did a Promo that lasted almost an hour. Those boys can talk. The question is: can you listen. We’ll see.

HRN 438: Leftovers

HRN 437: David Does a Rest Stop

/

Pre-show audio kicks in at 2:53. No, Gary didn’t screw up - that’s when we wanted it.

HRN West Coast Host David Goldenberg W0DHG spend last weekend as the Comm guy for one of the Stages of the Angeles Crest 100 mile Endurance Run. We get the slide show.

Before that, though, East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ analyzes our theme music, which sounds suspiciously like someone sending CQ (badly) on a piano. Then it’s “YouTube Takedown Testing” with snippets from a variety of media that also sound as though they were based on Morse Code. Including… and one you hear it you’ll never unhear it… the Mission Impossible theme.

We are joined by our Midwest Correspondent Kyle Kreig AA0Z to round out the team.

LINKS


PROMO for HRN 437

/

Part ONE: All Left Channel

Sometimes a quick promo becomes a show.

Who am I kidding. Most of the time, what was intended to be a quick promo becomes a show.

Part TWO: back in stereo. This is really for true fans. But we have fun.

We’re not saying it’s a good show. Just a long show. It’s just Kyle AA0Z and Gary K4AAQ. And the YouTube and Facebook versions come in two parts because Windows Update. No, we didn’t get an ‘update’ in the middle of the show. An update scrambled the Windows audio settings, and of course Gary didn’t notice. Finally a viewer commented. Fixing it required a total restart.

The audio file is ‘fixed’. The video is what it is.