Joel Hainley

Saturday morning i took the test for the Amateur Radio Extra license and passed ( 49/50 ). So I have finished all of the testing that one can do in the Amateur Radio world…done…completed..finished…etc. I don’t remember if I talked about this before, but I wrote a perl application to help me go through the entire question pool for all of the amateur radio tests. It has some useful features, and I found it invaluable for preparation. There’s a chance that I might be doing something interesting with all that I learned from putting that together. We’ll see.

I bought a variac a few weeks ago to help me in experimenting with cutting foam wings for the r/c flying thing. While we were waiting for the test results from the extra test, dad got to talking to a guy about bringing old equipment back online and this guy recommended using the variac to slowly ( over the course of an hour or so ) bring the equipment back up to full voltage.

So yesterday, we pulled the Hammarlund receiver out of the attic, cleaned it up a bit, and hooked it up to the variac, and started applying power. Before long, we were pulling in some random signals off of a random wire antenna about 4 feet long. Very very cool. Now I just need to get a longer piece of wire.

We stopped by frys to pick up a book and while we were there I picked up a training cd for assissting you in learning cw ( morse code ) yesterday we started listening to that a bit.  Amy was sitting there with us while we were bringing up the receiver and listening to the cd, and when they started sending out random code bits she started to copy. She seemed to take to it pretty easily, so who knows, she may have her ticket before this is all over with.

I wasn’t looking for another hobby, but i was looking for a space for me to learn more about electronics and have interesting things to fiddle with in the electronics world. I think this might be a good place for me to play.