ham radio

This year, upgraded to General after 9 years as a Technician. I used the online tests below to study, along with the Gordon West books.

http://www.qrz.com/testing.html

http://www.eham.net/exams/

Radio Mobile Freeware by VE2DBE lets you use use digital elevation model data to predict the coverage of a transmitter (propagation simulation).  http://www.g3tvu.co.uk/Radio_Mobile.htm has an installer and additional data.

Alinco Welcome Page
Alinco Electronics, amateur radio’s value leader, sells high quality hand held and mobile transceivers
All About Packet Radio Digipeaters: Digital Repeaters
Antenna arrays
antenna basics

Scanning

There used to be a pretty good page called “stupid scanner tricks” that told you all the fast food drive thru freqs, baby monitor freqs, etc.  This isn’t it.  But here is my favorite scanner trick this year: traffic helicopters.

You know how it is, stuck in traffic, glued to the AM radio just hoping for a traffic report. Around here, one station promises “traffic on the 4’s”, i.e. every 10 minutes (except where there’s a stupid baseball game, which is when you really need better traffic reports, due to all the ball game traffic); another station promises traffic every 15 minutes, a third station gets around to it seemingly at random. What’s a poor commuter to do? Here is the scanner trick: listen to the traffic helicopters. You get far more information than they actually report on the broadcast radio, and you don’t have to suffer through all the lame commercials to get it.

http://www.radioreference.com/

http://www.radioreference.com/forums/washington-radio-discussion-forum/

http://www.northwestradio.net/intercept/

http://www.northwestradio.net/bbs/

Good info about scanning King County stuff:

http://www.kellykeeton.com/radio/

Highline Amateur Radio Club