San Antonio Hams

One of the reasons some hams don’t wish to participate in amateur radio contests is that they believe they can never win a top spot using simple equipment against thousands of stations.

There are several ways to answer this.

One, you aren’t competing against the big stations in most contests as they usually break down the entries in to level playing fields such as entries for high and low power levels, etc.

Second, you should be thinking of your own contest operation as a challenge to yourself and not to others, to see how well you can do based upon the set up you have and your choice of bands based on propagation.

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Dear Fellow Hams!  Just in case you were unaware of this free source of information about ham radio hardware “fixes”, I chose to share this recently received electronic newsletter from www.mods.dk to which I subscribe.

While the site is hosted in Germany, the site is written in English.  I’ve found lots of hard to find manuals for obscure radios, or current radios.  And if you wanted to modify a radio, but didn’t know how, they usually have the instructions.  Of course, I’m not trying to encourage anyone to make illegal mods, or to use their transmitter in an illegal fashion.  But there are legit reasons for being able to receive or transmit out of what was “normal” when a rig was built, such as the 60 meter band that was recently opened for hams to use (few years ago).   Many older HF rigs won’t go there without a mod, like the  ICOM 706MKII-G, etc.

Anyway… Here is the newsletter I just received today.  If you find it interesting, please visit their website and sign up for your own copy.  It only comes out every 2 or 3 months.

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Title: Smithville Hamfest
Location: Bastrop TX
Link out: Click here
Description: Smithville Hamfest – Riverbend Park @ Bastrop
145.350(-)114.8Hz
443.750(+)114.8Hz

Start Time: 08:00
Date: 2009-05-16
End Time: 12:00

Apparently the 7290 Traffic Net also hold their event there, and they had a better map and directions on their site. Here is image of map.