HamRadioNow

You might remember this is the Visalia DX Convention , relocated this year a few miles down the California coast to Santa Maria. But we’re not doing any DXing or Contesting - this is the ARRL Forum with two Directors: Dick Norton N6AA (the ‘renegade’, Southwest Division), and John Litz NZ6Q (the traditionalist, Pacific Division). First, David and Gary yak a bit (because it’s their show), and then...

Is Aviation communications stuck in the past? It's been AM - Amplitude Modulation - on VHF since the 1940s. There have been additions, including some text-based data comm and navigation aids, but primary voice communication is still used for almost everything, and it's still AM. Captain Steeeve is a recently retired airline pilot and former military pilot. He also produces a YouTube show where he...

Dick Norton N6AA (ARRL Southwestern Division Director) sent us this video of the Youth Forum from the 2026 Santa Maria DXers and Contesters Convention. Dick is the moderator, and Violetta Latham KN2P is the speaker. Violetta is a young ham herself, and she relates her experience getting involved in ham radio along with her five siblings and her parents. Since it’s our show, David and Gary play Sto...

Dick Norton N6AA remains kind of a renegade ARRL Director, part of a minority of Directors who oppose the League policy of muzzeling Directors who disagree with Board decisions. His presentations at ARRL Forums are always more interesting than the average recitation of facts and figures. This forum doesn’t get into the disputed territory so much, but there are some enlightening moments, as well as...

We recorded this episode 14 years to the day after HamRadioiNow Episode ONE was released to an unsuspecting public. A hat-tip to that, and we move on. Our first stop, Gary complains about his newest radio acquisition, a TYT MD UC 390, a waterproof dual-band DMR handheld. The problems: too loud at the lowest volume, and a dim screen (but remember, Gary is slowly going blind). Then a comment about t...

Ya know that 'MARS MOD' you use to jeep your radio so you can talk on GMRS? Well, it's really a thing. MARS, the Military Auxiliary Radio System , turned 100 last year. It's changed some over that time, but it's still all ham radio operators providing public service communications in affiliation with the Army and Air Force. The 'Army guy', Paul English WD8DBY , and the 'Air Force guy', Dave Antry...

Way back in 2015, the World Radio Conference allocated a worldwide ham radio band at 60 Meters. Here in the US we are finally getting that band. A whopping 15 kHz wide, with Phone, RTTY, data and CW permitted, and a whole 9.15 Watts ERP power limit. Of course, we’ve had 5 descrete ‘channels’ available on 60 for 23 years, initially for USB only, and later adding CW and data modes. One of those chan...

When you walk in the main gate at the Hamvention, the first exhibit you encounter is an outdoor collection of vehicles outfitted to the gills with ham radio. The banner says 'EmComm Vehicle Display ', and some of the vehicles are truely that, sponsored by organizations dedicated to emergency response. Others have diffeent purposes: contests, rovers, or just the ability to escape a poor home QTH an...

Last July, East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ/WRPG652 posted a QLog Entry about a GMRS ‘Travel Channel’ . after repeatedly answering the question “Is there one” on GMRS Facebook and Reddit forums. He linked to that essay when encountering the question several more times, and even got a few ‘good answer’ responses 😀. So we made it a show, because why not? He invited GMRS users on Reddit and Facebook to jo...

HRN Hosts David W0DHG and Gary K4AAQ had just finished recording an episode of the show about how Everybody Wants a Handneld (and why they shouldn’t) , and they tried hard to keep it on topic and fairly concise (and almost succeeded). But the pent-up ramble had to explode someplace, and that place was here, recorded immediately afterward. It ended up mostly being about David leaving his ARES affil...

In both Ham Radio and GMRS, there's no doubt, almost everyone starts out with a handheld radio. After making basically the same points about that - over and over - while answering questions in multiple Facebook and Reddit forums, HamRadioNow East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ/WRPG652 wrote an essay in his QLog blog on the HRN website. Now he can just link to the essay and go on with his day😉 (that has ac...

This episode wraps up our TOUR of the 2025 Hamvention®, but not our coverage. Gary still has a hard drive full of interviews to edit, and those will come out over the next few weeks. And maybe a live show with David W0DHG ? This episode includes both Saturday and Sunday, and just a little more pork chop. There are a few fun callbacks, to one of Gary K4AAQ ’s Ham Nation episodes and his pre- HamRad...

The Dayton Hamvention® is open all day Friday and Saturday, and a half-day on Sunday. East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ returned for the first time since 2017, and found it a bit more crowded. He expected to see other YouTuber media everywhere, but not so much... he did find some of them all in a pack in the flea market. But the star of the show? No, not the equipment (the other guys cover that in depth)...

East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ made it back to Dayton for the first time since 2017. Has much changed? Can he even remember (not really). This is a quick look at the tail end of Thursday, setup-day, before the fest opens Friday morning.

Richard "Dick" Norton N6AA , ARRL Southwestern Division Director, talks about the state of the ARRL at the Orange (CA) Section Convention .

The biggest hamfests are growing - Dayton, Orlando, Huntsville. Many smaller hamfests are struggling, or have closed down. Some clubs have had trouble finding a chair person and staff to put on shows that have been around for decades. Facilities are only getting more expensive, while attendence and income are falling. The ' RARSfest ' - coming April 5 and hosted by the Raleigh (NC) Amateur Radio S...

The Western Washington Amateur Relay Association has adopted a plan to migrate all repeaters in their area to 'Narrow FM' over the next 10 years. The idea is to increase the number of repeater channels (and the number of repeaters). The plan could nearly double the number of available repeater channels. It's mostly simple. For users, it's probably a menu setting in their radios, but OLDER radios w...

Our guest is Jim Masarra N2EST , cartoonist, animator, graphic designer. You've seen his work in QST (including some covers), and other ham books and publications. On the cusp of resirement, we talk about his career in and out of ham radio, and how the ARRL seems to have lost its sense of humor. Have him design a QSL card for you! : https://hamtoons.net

January 11, 1965, Amateur Radio Station WN9NSO made its first, shaky 5 wpm CW… attempt… in the 40 meter Novice band. 60 years later, WN9NSO is now K4AAQ , our East Coast Host. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, as Gary talks about what ham radio was like for that Novice, 60 years ago. No repeaters. No digital (RTTY was it). No computers. Lots of AM. Gary opened up the Zoom a...

David W0DHG and Gary K4AAQ discuss AI chat engines. Specifically, how Gary bullied chatGPT into correct answers about GMRS channel steps (for the record, it’s 12.5 kHz). Somebody in a Facebook group asked that question, and someone else got the answer from a confident chatGPT, but chat GPT got it wrong (they said 5 kHz). The challenge was ON , and Gary emerged victorious, with chatGPT backing down...

This week, Jason Johnston KC5HW B of the Ham Radio 2.0 show was reacting to viewer comments that there were Too Many Digital (Voice) Mode s. East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ has been preaching on that topic for years, and while his Q-Mobile does have radios for D-STAR, DMR and System Fusion… and so does his belt…. he wouldn’t mind having one rig to rule them all – a 21st Century ‘Multi-Mode’. That’s his...

East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ goes solo, with a timewaster of an episode. He’s just repurposing some of his many Facebook Group and Reddit responses to newbie ham and GMRS questions. After he gets done talking about his bike helmet.

To show, or not to show… that is the question. Are we running out of gas for HRN, or just a temporary lull. Hard to tell. This is Gary’s solo thoughts on the topic, but we’ll have a conversation about it soon. Also, how to keep ham radio from turning into Fox News.

Ham Radio activity - ‘unofficial’ and ad hoc as it may be - continues in the mountains of western North Carolina. The Mt. Mitchell 145.19 repeater remains active every day. For this show, we talk to a ham who was deployed at a couple of locations last week. Steve McAtee N0JJO lives in the Charlotte NC area, and heard a call go out for hams to assist. He geared up and set out, and now that he’s bac...

Last week, HRN hosts David W0DHG and Gary K4AAQ talked about some ad-hoc ham radio nets that spun up just after Tropical Storm Helene devastated a large area of North Carolina’s mountains, knocking out power, internet, phone and cell communications, flooding towns and destroying roads. The nets appeared to have no connection to any formal ham radio emcom organization. Initially they were passing l...