"Every CW op should have a Ten-Tec"
Those words were spoken to me when I bought my first rig as an almost-ham in 1978 as I paid for my shiny new Century 21. The Novice ticket arrived in the mail & the Century 21 (and many hams on the other end of it) began schooling me in the art of CW.
Elecraft came onto the scene years later and my old Elmer's praise of Ten-Tec could have applied to Elecraft as well.
This will either be quite an event or a nothing-burger. I'm betting on the latter.
In a very interesting week here in the US, I find myself particularly interested in news that the secret files relating to the assassinations of JFK and MLK, Jr. will soon be released.
For the life of me, I can't imagine what might be contained in those files to justify so much secrecy for so many years.
I was 2 years old and we lived in Dallas in 1963, about half a mile from where it all went down.
Despite being too young to remember any of it, or of the following memorial service in Dallas' Dealy Plaza three days later, my parents assured me years later that my mood was appropriately somber.
They, and thousands of others in Dallas, attended the service, 8mm film camera in hand to record the event, with me making a few cameo appearances. Such a drastically different world back then.
And color film in 1963. Dad was always on the cutting edge:
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On a lighter note, I have a book recommendation - the Stephen King novel, 11/22/63.
It's about a man who finds a way to travel in time back to 1958 - five years before the assassination. He arrives in 1958 in Maine and decides to travel to Dallas, get a job and apartment and wait for Lee Harvey Oswald to move to Dallas in 1960, at which point he will kill him before Oswald has a chance to assassinate Kennedy.
Things go wrong, of course, making for an incredibly engaging book.
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They were kept charged by a 200-watt solar panel on my roof and offered significant advantages to other 12V sources of power: no RF noise and no power outages due to storms.
Reliability to the max.
Then came LiFePO4 - a game-changer, a 120VAC-to12VDC power supply obsoleter. Goodbye, big ol clunky Astron.
My current (pun intended) shack supply for the past two years has been a 50AH LiFePO4 battery that runs my Hermes Lite 2 (and other radios), Neptune 100W amp, LDG autotuner, GPS clock and my keyer. Sometimes the FT-891 is online, but either way, I'm using 100 watts from the home QTH.
The battery is good for a 7 hours of non-stop, contest style activity; or, all day the way I use it, and that's if it's not attached to a trickle charger...which it always is.
Pure DC, no ripple.
Kenny KM3KM has announced that the upcoming 6-80m Mercury Lite amplifier has received FCC approval and will be available for purchase starting in March for $1986. No idea when pre-orders will begin being accepted. No pre-orders - "Orders will be taken in March and there will be no waiting".
Details of the amp are here and the manual can be downloaded here (1MB pdf).
The Mercury Lite seems to have a lot going for it: low drive level required, built-in ATU, automatic band-switching via RF detection and the ability to be powered from a 48V lithium battery.
That's a feature list that will put many Mercury Lites into the field on POTA and WWFF operations.
One knowledgeable fan has already ordered a 48V 20AH (3.5kg/8lbs, $175) battery. I'm calcuguessing that it will last about 2 hours in the field.
Ashhar Farhan VU2ESE merrily announced late yesterday that the zBitx is now available for purchase at HF Signals.
This is a fully assembled radio, not a kit, and should be regarded as an experimental, tinkerer's radio.
Here is the schematic.
I have one on the way.
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