I’ll be visiting the Chicago area on Fathers’ Day weekend and plan on making a stop at the Six Meter Club of Chicago hamfest June 18 at the DuPage County Fairgrounds in Wheaton, Illinois. Come on by and see me if you’re in the neighborhood. I’d love to meet some of… Read more »
Based on reader comments and what I see around the internet, the off grid amateur radio community seems to be of the mindset that there are only two real options for solar energy: Large, expensive arrays that produce a lot of power but are permanently installed, and small inexpensive panels… Read more »
Inexpensive gas generators are a big favorite in the amateur radio community. Everyone seems to love these effective albeit cheaply made power plants! As they became more popular, the law of averages kicked in and there was an unfortunate but not unexpected increase in accidents and deaths related to small… Read more »
One of the primary concerns of radio amateurs who operate with alternative energy is something I call communications efficiency, or, getting the most signal you can for the input power. A lot of fuss, maybe too much, is spent on squeezing every last watt out of our solar panels, generators,… Read more »
This is a very exciting time of changes for off grid and alternative energy. The cost of established systems is coming way down and many new discoveries are in the pipeline. For sure, a lot of emerging off grid technology is highly theoretical and may never appear on the end… Read more »
You did your homework, absorbed all the great advice here on Off Grid Ham, and put together an off grid amateur radio setup that works well and serves your needs, at least in theory. What now? To continue with a theme from my last article about Winter Field Day, here’s the… Read more »
Deliberately stepping away from a comfortable home operating position to practice ham radio in poor conditions is not an idea too many amateurs find appealing, yet it is a situation that radio amateurs should be familiar with before it actually happens, because at some point it probably will happen. If… Read more »
For all the choices, it’s surprisingly hard to find a portable antenna for HF that is affordable and practical. A portable antenna does not have to be an epic quest. In this article I’ll discuss a few options and then give detailed instructions on how to make a super-easy, super-cheap HF… Read more »
While doing a routine backup of Off Grid Ham, I discovered numerous, possibly dozens, of reader emails sent through the Contact page. It appears that all of them were legitimate comments from readers, not spam. For some reason I never received any of these emails. They are not in my… Read more »
I am usually against buying wire antennas, especially dipoles. It seems kind of lazy to buy something that can be made quickly for very little money. There are exceptions, though. In my situation, I needed a multi band antenna for limited space and would work without a lot of tinkering… Read more »
The off grid amateur radio world seems to revolve around solar. There’s a good reason for that: Solar has become easier, less expensive, and the required equipment is relatively hands off once it is installed. The other options have shown incremental improvements as well, but none have matched solar in… Read more »
Thanks to advances in technology, off grid power is a lot cheaper and easier than in the past. One area that barely changed for decades was generators. Since the time of Edison, it was straightforward: A mechanical power source turns a magnet inside a copper coil and creates electrical current…. Read more »