K6YES

It has been a while since my last post as it happens often with hobbies and other pleasures in life…work and obligations got in the way. It has been a very busy seven months, to say the least. Lucky me that I am taking a few days off.  In this post, I share my setup for operating remotely five feet away!!! Unfortunately, work is not the only thing that happened in the past few months…as I had surgery on my foot and won’t be able to walk for a few months. I got myself a knee scooter! It even has a basket which I may add has come in extremely handy. Moving around with a knee scooter is a lot harder than I thought it […]

Amateur radio operators all over the world are asking themselves this question: How is radio wave propagation? Radio wave propagation is the behavior of radio waves as they travel, or are propagated, from one point to another, or into various parts of the atmosphere (Wikipedia). In simple terms, the answer to this question tells us how easy or difficult making radio contacts will be today. There are many prediction tools available online to estimate radio wave propagation for next week or the week after…but they are only predictions…you never know for sure until you try. The solar-terrestrial data panel, shown here, provided by Paul L Herrman (N0NBH) through his website http://www.hamqsl.com/solar.html is very helpful. I can confirm that for today the data is accurate. Today’s

In this post, we introduce the basics of the FT8 digital mode of communications for amateur radio. In simple terms, it is similar to how fax machines and modems communicate with each other. For the very young, you may need to ask an elder about fax machines and modems. I know, I know…how did we live back in those days with such slow and noisy machines… In the FT8 digital mode, the text is converted into a series of chirping noises by a computer to be sent through the radio and heard by other radios around the world connected to computers that convert the noise back to the text to be displayed on the screen. Chirping and text conversion is handled by a software program.

In this post, I share the K6YES station and antennas – my humble operating station.  I have been really happy with the performance of my station. The Elecraft K3S is the best radio I have ever owned and the antenna at a height of 35′ does better than expected because of its location. It is at the peak of a small hill with sharp slopes in the west and east directions. Here is a summary of my current setup: Elecraft K3S Radio, Heil ProSet-K2 Microphone, Elecraft KPA500 Amplifier, Elecraft KAT500 Automatic Tuner, Elecraft P3 Panadapter, Tashjian MW-33 Tower, JK Antennas XR7-JK (6 – 40M Yagi), Ni4L 30M Inverted-Vee, and Alpha Delta DX-80 80M Inverted-Vee. Hector (AD6D) Doing a Fantastic Job Setting Up the K6YES Station

My name is Pablo and if you are an amateur radio operator, you know me as K6YES. In this post, I share the K6YES intro to amateur radio as a kid in Puerto Rico.  I have been fascinated by radio communications for as long as I can remember – all the way back to my first set of walkie-talkies when I was 5 years old. My interest in antennas started shortly after with my first radio – a one-speaker Panasonic AM/FM radio – when I learned I could hear new stations by connecting cables of different lengths to the built-in antenna. I was seven or eight when I opened the Panasonic to tinker inside to hear radio stations farther away. My Panasonic radio never worked