HamRadioNow

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: K...

With nowhere particularly to go, we spent most of the show talking about an article in Field & Stream about the ‘Best Ham Radio’. Yes, Field & Stream.

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...

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 D...

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

Over the weekend, Gary K4AAQ played Ham Radio really hard with BikeMS in North Carolina. He checks in with a slide show from his hotel room while David W0DHG anchors from the West Coast Studio. Then Jim NO1PC reviews the issues with some of the USB cables needed for programming radios (and why some of those cables don’t work ).

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. 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 ove...

QRZ.com and GigaParts are giving away this dual-band handheld to new hams until Halloween 2022. is it ‘free and worth it’, or is it a decent radio? We check it out.

NOTE: There is some intermittent audio breakup in this recording. We refer to it based on chat-room reports, and find that it was recorded, not just online. 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 Ha...

AUDIO AUDIENCE NOTE: there’s a lot of visual stuff here. Or at least we think there is. It’s the kind of thing you may or may not be able to make up in your head as you listen. And there will be a show Sunday night. A ‘real’ show? Well, that’s yet to be determined. But this one went on long enough that we figured we should put it on the stream by itself and not tag it to the Sunday show. ========...

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. If you believe that, you’ve never watched this show before. On Saturday, the day before the...

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 so...

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. 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 setti...

So we move to 10pm Eastern/7pm Pacific… do one show… then do a bunch of ‘No Show/Not a Show’ shows off schedule for one reason or another. Tonight we finally get back on schedule, and David and Jim aren’t available. Jim is still galivanting around the US, and David is sleeping after a big public service event kept him up all weekend. So filling in, we roped in Jason Johnston KC5HWB from Ham Radio...

Gary developed COVID just after returning from his Canadian vacation with Cyndi KD4ACW . He felt good enough to do a quick ‘no show’ show early Sunday, not knowing how he might feel by Sunday night’s regular time slot. David was available, and a drop-in from ‘East Coast Correspondent’ Marty NN1C rounded out the crew. Marty’s not to happy about being demoted from ‘host’ to ‘correspondent’🤨.

It only takes David W0DHG and Gary K4AAQ 37 minutes to tell you that we’re not doing a show this Sunday. Because Gary (and Cyndi KD4ACW) are heading out to Vancouver BC for a train trip through the Rockies. So we talk (but don’t do a show) about programming Gary’s DMR HT for the trip.

The Live Stream has shifted to 7 PM Pacific, 10 PM Eastern Sunday, 0200Z (Monday, during US Daylight Saving Time) (not that you podcast listeners care, but maybe it opened up a window to watching the live show on YouTube or Facebook) How do you program your VHF/UHF radios? Totally by hand? Using software? Either way, do you have a plan? A strategy? Or do you just chunk channels in there willy-nill...

We’re not doing a show on Sunday, July 3rd, because holiday. But we can’t leave you high and dry. High is up to you. Dry we can help with a little. David and Gary popped online to do a five-minute quickie, and almost an hour later, they were done. Among other things, they discussed moving the show to a different time/day. There’s a poll on the HRN Facebook Group, asking when you the audience would...

David was up almost all night. Could he do a show? Jim was on the road. Could he show up? And Gary had spent a live stream earlier in the day* insulting Kyle AA0Z while restreaming Kyle’s Field Day live stream, then had the audacity to invite Kyle to come on the show. Would he show up? The answers to these important questions will be revealed as you watch or listen to this week’s thrilling episode...

Sean Kutzko KX9X and Nancy Livingston N9NCY are about to embark on a vacation from their home in central Illinois to Glacier National Park in Montana. The point of the trip is hiking and camping, but because Sean is Sean (and Nancy seems enthusiastic about it), there will be hamming. Mostly on Satellites from ‘rare’ grid squares, and some six meters. And they came by to talk about the trip. If tha...

This is a jam packed show. First, we talk with John Hays K7VE . John is Outreach Manager with the Amateur Radio Digital Communications Foundation . For the past three years, this group has made grants totaling millions of dollars to Amateur Radio groups and projects… and they’re just getting started. Find out where they got the money and how they give it away (maybe to your club?). John also talks...

Host Gary K4AAQ caught what he describes as the Holy Grail of scanning – a beginning-to-end major (for his little burg) police manhunt, from initial call to final resolution. He says that almost never happens. And it only took an hour and a quarter to begin that segment of the show. David W0DHG (or, as Gary incorrectly typed in David’s title: WDHG ) and Jim NO1PC had plenty of other stuff to talk...

It’s Sunday night of the Memorial Day weekend. David W0DHG, Marty NN1C and Gary K4AAQ have nothing better to do, but no show topic is planned. We were gonna skip the week due to the holiday, but here we were. So we started the streams, pushed record, and away we went. Gary’s Wirecast program crashed in the middle of recording, hence the two parts on YouTube and Facebook. The audio version is edite...

So, GMRS - General Mobile Radio Service - is a thing. It’s becoming a big thing, or so it seems. And at least around Gary’s area (Charlotte NC), a lot of hams also have GMRS licenses. And with the fee dropped from $70 to $35, likely a lot more will (GMRS users are happy about $35, while many hams are grousing about it). And it turns out that your hosts already had GMRS licenses. David is WROT234....

David, Jim and Gary ramble about the upcoming Dayton Hamvention (they won't be there) and the planned PopUp videos from our field reporter, Marty NN1C, who will be live on the scene! We get a surprise visit from Ham Radio 2.0's Jason Johnston KC5HWB