Tentative radio plans for 2026

Bike, KX2, folding drone, antenna mount/17ft (5m) whip

Let's see if I can pull either of these off:

 

TAT with QRP

For the past few months, I've been outfitting an off-road motorcycle that will allow me to ride the Trans-America Trail. Off pavement, from Florida to Oregon - with a QRP rig, of course.

The parallels between Elio and Ten-Tec

 

Ermak - Ermak-TT - TT Phoenix

It's been a long time since Mike Dishop N8WFF took over Ten-Tec and made a list of claims on how the company would begin producing new products.

His faithful comrade, John Henry KI4JPL, provided a kinder, gentler outline in 2015 of what us TT fans might see in the coming months. Ten-Tec transceivers, amps, etc.

Those months turned into years, and now a decade has passed.

History repeats itself:

Predictions for 2026, and the coming years, in ham radio

Some of the things we might see in the ham radio hobby as 2026 looms: 

• A KX4 will be released, finally! - by Kenwood. They want to get back into the "QRP game" and don't mind capitalizing on another manufacturer's sequential naming scheme.

• A tinyOscilloscope will be produced, complementing the other tinyXXX pieces of test equipment. It'll have a 300 MHz bandwidth and a 2GHz sampling rate. Every ham will want one, every ham will have one.

• James Cameron will produce a hit movie with a ham radio operator as the hero who saves the world from nuclear annihilation by sending an encoded FT8 message to an orbiting 400 jiggga-ton (not a typo) bomb named Colossus. The message directs the bomb to self-destruct. This increases ionization of the Earth's atmosphere by a factor of 8. Intercontinental DX will be the norm up to 450 MHz. 10 meters will be considered a "low band".

CQWW-CW from an HOA; Anan-10E vs. Hermes Lite 2+

I went into the contest with the goal of testing the performance of the HL2+ in crowded CW conditions.

Rather than writing a dry narrative of "How I spent my weekend" (actually only four hours of it), I'll just sum it all up in bullet points:

Hermes Lilte 2 becomes HL2 Plus, awaits CQWW-CW

With the arrival of my Apache Labs 10E, I finally worked up the courage to put my HL2 under the knife for the surgery required to convert it to a Plus version.

No, it didn't get fatter; it just got better.

The update required removing a 0603 ferrite bead, adding a 0603 resistor & a small piggy-backed PC board, and updating the gateware.

And a few other small things that, all tolled (or is it "told"?), took 20 minutes.

It's the gateware thing that got me - I'd never heard of either the word or the process, but I know I didn't want to risk bricking the HL2.

Long story short - I should have done it long ago. Everything went smoothly.