KI5GRD Has Entered the Chat
Welcome to my ham radio blog. It's not much, but it's honest.
What is Going on Here?
I am Gary, KI5GRD. I've decided to start a ham radio blog to document some of my builds and portable activations.
I've been thinking about doing this for a while. What got me to finally do it was my most recent build. I wanted a trap vertical antenna that would work on 10, 15 and 20 meters, but I couldn’t find suitable plans anywhere.
It was difficult for me to find good and reliable information about building air-form and toroid traps (especially with regard to capacitor selection). And not a single website seemed to put things together in a way that I simply had to measure and cut (it would have been nice).
I ended up doing the research and making a build over the course of about three weeks. I was very happy with the result. It’s worth sharing, but I don’t really have an avenue for that.
So here we are…
Are You Qualified?
No. Absolutely not. In fact, I put the “amateur” in “amateur radio”.
I’ve been a ham since 2019, but I didn’t get serious about it until 2020 when my Dad and I decided we wanted to get on HF. So I got my general ticket, scored a Yaesu FT-891, built a linked dipole and got on the air.
Then started a phase of intense antenna building and experimentation, which continues.
What Can I Expect?
Well, I like amateur radio—homebrew, QRP, portable operations, antenna building. There’s a lot of fodder there.
And then there’s electronics. And Arduino. 3D printing. Raspberry Pis. Software hacking. Weather satellites. ADSB. The list goes on.
Frequency of posts will be commensurate with my free time. I may go months in between updates. So maybe consider subscribing—your call.
Thanks for reading. Let’s get this show on the road.