Today's Projects by K7WJV

Today was less of a project day and more getting out and putting my kit to use.  My brother met me at Flaming Geyser State Park to do a Parks on the Air (POTA) activation.  If you haven't heard of Parks on the Air, there are several programs like it, all designed to bring more people into the amateur radio community.  This seems to have caught on like wildfire and I'm having a lot of fun with it.  There isn't much to it.  There are state and national parks on the registry that have been assigned an identifying number.  Find a park near you, take your radio gear out there, and get at least 10 natural (not through repeaters) contacts to consider the park activated.  There are activators and hunters.  If you are an activator, you are physically at the park.  Hunters on the other hand, can be anywhere, and their goal is to make contact with activators.  There are certificates that you can earn for various milestones, but I'm really just in ...

Well, I decided to jump on the craze and create a Hammo Can.  The idea was to put a 2m/70cm radio, a LifePo4 battery, external speaker, microphone, and antenna connector in an ammo can.  Hopefully with enough room left for me to put a small chunk of coax and an easy to deploy J-pole antenna in there.   I surfed around the interwebs and found all kind of examples, some people went over the top with theirs and obviously invested upwards of $1000.  My plan was to keep dollar amounts as low as possible and still end up with a cool product. Off to Harbor Freight I went.  They had a couple different flavors of ammo cans…. I grabbed a couple of each of the plastic ones.   Built the original one in the smaller of the two, but later decided I wanted a little bit more room and moved the entire setup over to the larger can.   Now that I had the cans and an idea of the space I had to deal with I started hunting for a radio.  I landed on the  Anytone AT-7...