Tag: notebook

The Times They Are a-Changin’

My intent for this blog is to serve primarily as a notebook – a place where I can capture important details concerning my amateur radio activities and then refer back to them if needed. This includes interesting websites, hamshack successes and failures, equipment settings, as well as plans for the future. Occasionally the subject matter on the blog opens a bit broader… beyond amateur radio <gasp!>.

The cliche about some long time hams of having life “take over” at some point in a ham career is a cliche for a good reason. Sometimes the balance tips and radios are put on the backshelf. I’m at a mid-life career transition point, retiring from the military and moving into “the next phase”. Plan A is to become an elementary school teacher. None of my previous academic work really supports this transition and despite popular misconceptions, in the state of Kansas… you can’t just show up and say “Hey, I’d like to be a teacher!” It is actually a somewhat difficult process. Fortunately a nearby university has a well respected program that I am not too far from completing. The program is time intensive (this semester I am taking 13 credit hours… while working full-time). This is my last semester behind the desk. I start my retirement transition at the end of December and in January I start student teaching.

One of the great aspects to the program I am in is that I get plenty of time inside elementary grade classrooms so I have a clear idea of what I am getting into. Over the last 12 months I have had the opportunities to visit numerous classrooms seeing various grade levels and teaching styles. It is great going into this transition with my eyes wide open.

However, this educational experience (along with work) has been time-intensive. My time in front of the radio (or submitting blog entries) has been seriously limited. The hamshack has become somewhat of a dumping ground (for my other hobbies of O gauge model trains and 80’s arcade games) and only recently was I able to did a path out from the door to the operating desk. My goal is to adjust the balance just a bit and spend a little more time with the radios. We’ll see how it goes.

The Ham Notebook

I got my March issue of CQ Magazine and enjoyed the renaming of the Beginner’s Corner column to The Ham Notebook. Columnist Wayne Yoshida, KH6WZ, explains the name change to reflect a column that contains information that every ham should know. Continuing on the notebook theme, Wayne notes the importance of record keeping for on air activity, a way to track contacts for the various awards, changes to the station setup (to include antenna modification, addition of new radios, etc.), and as a project log to reflect what’s on the bench. He points out this “notebook” can be kept in a hard copy format or digitally based to take advantage of quick searches for what you are looking for.
I couldn’t agree more with Wayne. To an extent, I’ve used this blog to keep notes on what I am doing and record successes and failures. I use the blog as a reference consistently. I am a little less disciplined about keeping a dedicated hard copy notebook. I have many of them floating around but I need to make it a regular habit of using the hard copy journal to keep track of what’s going on in the shack.
Speaking of what’s going on – I had the computer that was running my weather station and APRS go down.

The Shuttle K45 is a minimalist piece of hardware that I picked up about 18 months ago. Friday at 6pm the K45 died. I did a cursory inspection of the computer and didn’t notice anything miss. I did some minor troubleshooting to no avail. I figured it was probably the power supply. I took the computer to a local repair shop who determined that it was the motherboard that had gone bad. Back home with a bit of internet research I found that the dead motherboard was an epidemic caused by a handful of bad capacitors. I am going to try to swap out the bad ones and see if I can bring the K45 back to life.
Meanwhile I have swapped in an older computer that I had been using some time back to run the weather station and APRS.