CQ Amateur Radio January 2023

JANUARY 2023 LOCUST FORK, ALABAMA — The Blount County Amateur Radio Club will hold Freezefest 2023 from 8 a.m. to noon, Saturday, January 7 at the Locust Fork High School Cafeteria, 155 School Road. Website: <http://w4blt.org>. Talk-in 146.700-(PL 91.5). VE exams. Contact: Jack (407) 443-1963. GLENDALE, ARIZONA — The Thunderbird Amateur Radio Club will hold the 2023 TBARC Hamfest from 8 a.m. to noon, Saturday, January 14 at the Haven Church, 5902 W. Cactus Road. Website: <http://tbirdfest.org>. Talk-in 147.040+ (PL 162.2). GREENWOOD, SOUTH CAROLINA — The Greenwood Amateur Radio Society will hold the Greenwood South Carolina Indoor Hamfest beginning 9 a.m., Saturday, January 14 at the Piedmont Technical College-James Medford Family Event Center. Contact: Ted Davison, AI4WN, <w4gwd@arrl.net> or <w4dew@arrl.net>. Website: <www.w4gwd.org>. Talk-in 147.165+ (PL 107.2) or 443.900+ (PL 107.2). VE exams HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA…

Hamvention Selects Innovation as 2023 Theme Organizers of the Dayton Hamvention® have selected “Innovation!” as the show’s theme for 2023. According to an announcement from the Dayton Amateur Radio Association, the theme “encompasses in just one word the world of amateur radio today. There are so many exciting ‘Innovations!’ worldwide in amateur radio (that) we want to capture the spirit and we expect to see many of these throughout the coming year and presented at Hamvention ’23.” The 2023 Hamvention is scheduled for May 19-21st at the Greene County Fairgrounds and Exposition Center in Xenia, Ohio. Japanese Amateur Radio Lunar Satellite Lost in Space The OMOTENASHI satellite, built by the ham radio club at the Japanese space agency and launched to the moon by NASA’s Artemis-1 mission, is missing in action but controllers…

Happy New Year! The start of a new year is typically a time of new beginnings and with outdoor radio activities on hold for many of us due to cold and snow (except for Winter Field Day and, of course, antenna work!), winter is a perfect time to begin a new shack project or start planning for station improvements when the weather warms up. For some of us, that might mean building a new kit that appeared under the tree. For others, it could be planning out new antennas or discovering a new band or mode. For still others, it can be a good time for refining emergency communication plans with served agencies or planning springtime exercises (or winter ones, for that matter; emergencies and disasters don’t wait for warm…

In a surprise move in early November, the owners of shortwave broadcaster WTWW (5085 kHz) abruptly pulled the plug on the station’s radio transmissions, moving exclusively to online streaming. However, much of the station’s musical and ham radio-related programming, such as Ted Randall’s “QSO Radio Show” and Ria Jairam’s “Ria’s Shack Ham Radio,” quickly QSYed to WRMI in Miami, returning to the airwaves on 9455 kHz under the “WRMI Legends” moniker. Additional frequencies have been added at 4980, 5850 and 9395 kHz. Randall, WB8PUM, was WTWW’s Chief Engineer as well as the host of “QSO Radio.” He said the decision to shutter the station was a financial one and came from the owners on very short notice, saying he was told, “we can’t afford to do this anymore.” “When I signed off…

Thanks to the graciousness of Francesco Valsecchi, IKØFVC, I had the rare opportunity to be a guest operator at the Vatican amateur radio station, HVØA. Accompanying me was my mentor, teacher, and friend Alex Hajosevic, YT3H. Now that I’ve returned to Serbia and have collected my thoughts, I would like to tell the amateur radio community about my fantastic trip and experience while working the DX pileups from the Vatican at HVØA. Without the hospitality and assistance from Francesco, none of this would have been possible. From the bottom of my heart, I must thank Francesco for providing me with this tremendous opportunity to operate the much sought-after DX callsign, HVØA. Francesco opened some new doors for me in the hobby. Perhaps to many readers, this would seem to be a simple…

The international scientific community announced last summer that a mysterious radio burst with a pattern similar to a heartbeat had been detected in space. The signal was detected by the innovative Canadian radio telescope called CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) (Photo A). Scientists and astronomers estimate that the signal came from a galaxy about a billion light-years away, but the exact source and nature of this signal are unknown. To begin explaining this phenomenon, let’s first quickly define what radio bursts are. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are intense millisecond bursts of radio waves, which are of as yet unknown origins. The first FRB was discovered in 2007 and since then, hundreds of these fast cosmic flashes from the universe have been detected. This new signal, discovered in July 2022, was…