Ham Radio Help Desk

Headsets are an excellent accessory for your amateur radio station. There are so many to choose from it might seem overwhelming to pick one. They come in large sizes to small and work with some radios while not with others. This is a description of the process I used to select my headset in the hopes it will help others decide if, when and which headsets they should consider.
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While I was researching some information from World Radio Magazine I stumbled on their photo gallery of various amateur radio station layouts at this sub URL…

Various Station Layouts

My favorite was the very first one I clicked featuring components based around a Yaesu FT-920 Transciever. The tight fitting compartments for every component makes this a smart clean and functional looking station. Here is the link…

W8DMC’s Station

Great job Doug!

If you are looking for ideas for your own ham shack you are well advised to view what others have done and this gallery is a good place to start.

An interesting article appears in the October issue of World Radio Magazine. The author of the regular EmComm section told the readers good bye as he does not intend to write about Emergency Communications in the context of Amateur Radio any more.
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Doug Adams must have not been an amateur radio operator for he seems to have missed the answer to everything suggesting 42 as the answer to it all.

Perhaps he is right for many things, but for ham radio folks evaluating antenna choices a popular answer for the height of a vertical antenna for the HF bands appears to be 43.

Be sure to check out the many posts about the 43 foot antenna here at Ham Help Desk.
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With the upcoming solar cycle pushing operations on the HF bands towards success on 20 meters to 10 meters you might be wondering if a vertical antenna may be the right choice for making the most of this time.

Well, to be honest you may well have just as much success with a simple horizontal dipole strung up.

Dipoles are pretty easy to build and don’t cost too much if you would rather purchase one from Alpha-Delta or the Wireman.

However, if you…
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So you have your ham radio ticket and are interested in getting on the HF bands. You are not alone. The HF bands are THE place to really see what ham radio is about. If you only have a technician license, you won’t be able to exercise phone privileges except on 10 meters. However, you do have CW privileges on 80, 40 and 15 meters. You should take full advantage of this.

Assuming you have made the investment in an HF radio and antenna, you might still be worried about making that first Morse code contact.

You may also be very apprehensive what others will think of your Morse code CW skills.

Not to worry. We were all beginners once and yours truly is still in the learning process.

The good news is many organizations exist to help you get going with CW and have several web pages full of excellent information on what to expect during CW contacts.

FISTS.ORG is one such organization.

They publish a Basic CW Operating Manual to help you get started. Here is the link… enjoy.

As you begin your adventure sending and receiving Morse code on the HF bands you will almost instantly hear a variety of short hand abbreviations. Many are obvious while others aren’t.

CW works well with these abbreviations and may even lend themselves to cell phone text messaging since both systems benefit from sending fewer characters.
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A viewer has a problem powering two radios from one power supply.

This situation is quite likely very common among amateur radio operators who keep a simple shack set up with one large power supply feeding multiple loads.
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