Back in this post, we celebrated the landing of NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover launch and landing. NASA created a program by which the names of individuals here on Earth could be etched on a chip and sent to Mars as part of Perseverance. We submitted the names of the folks in the household and now our four names are among 1.2 million of our closest friends’ names on Mars.
NASA is at it again with their Europa Clipper mission scheduled for launch in October, 2024. Since I egregiously failed to include my sons, Jonathon and Andrew Wolfe in the previous mission, I made sure to not just add these fine gentlemen to the list of names destined for Europa, but gave them top billing in the gallery below.
From NASA’s website, “[The Europa Clipper’s] three main science objectives are to understand the nature of the ice shell and the ocean beneath it, along with the moon’s composition and geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.
“NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft will perform dozens of close flybys of Jupiter’s moon Europa, gathering detailed measurements to investigate the moon. The spacecraft, in orbit around Jupiter, will make nearly 50 flybys of Europa at closest-approach altitudes as low as 16 miles (25 kilometers) above the surface, soaring over a different location during each flyby to scan nearly the entire moon.
“Europa shows strong evidence for an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust. Beyond Earth, Europa is considered one of the most promising places where we might find currently habitable environments in our solar system. Europa Clipper will determine whether there are places below Europa’s surface that could support life.“
It will be an honor to accompany the Europa Clipper to the outer reaches of our Solar System. It will be an even greater honor to be with the family for all time one more time.
Warning: This is a ham radio post. If you’re not a nerd, turn back now.You’ve been warned.
As some of you may know, I am a licensed amateur radio operator known colloquially as a ham radio operator. From time to time, I write something about ham radio even though it’s a very small community and not likely to be read by any other hams.
This blog, sparse as it is, contains three ham radio posts. They are:
Feel free to read those if you like, but for those looking for the TL;DR version, Chat GPT tells me that:
“Ham radio, also known as amateur radio, is a hobby that allows people to communicate over long distances using radio frequencies. Unlike standard commercial broadcasts, ham radio operators use a variety of equipment to send and receive messages, often bypassing the need for the internet or phone networks. This can be especially valuable in emergencies, when other forms of communication may be unavailable. Ham radio operators often assist in disaster relief efforts, providing crucial communication links. Beyond emergencies, ham radio fosters global connections, enabling hobbyists to learn about electronics, communication technology, and to connect with others worldwide.”
There exist several ways to communicate among hams, for example, morse code, voice, television, or from computer to computer. One of the computer modes is called FT-8. I’ll rely on Chat GPT again for a brief description:
“FT-8 is a popular digital mode in ham radio designed for making reliable, short-distance and long-distance contacts under challenging conditions. Developed by Nobel laureate Joe Taylor, FT-8 uses a computer and radio to exchange minimal information, such as call signs and signal reports, in rapid, automated sequences. It’s particularly useful when signals are weak or the band conditions are poor, allowing operators to communicate with stations thousands of miles away, even when voice or other digital modes struggle. FT-8 is widely used for casual contacts and DXing (long-distance communication) due to its efficiency and ability to connect stations with very low power signals.”
All set? Got the terminology? OK, off we go!
Ham radio operators are divided on the legitimacy of FT-8 in ham radio. Some operators believe that the automatic collection of contacts, or QSLs, is a cheat. It’s not REAL ham radio. Some believe that you can set up FT-8 in your shack and walk away from the computer and let it do all the contacting. Others believe that using FT-8 for contests and awards is cheating, too, since the operator isn’t really contacting a person. It’s just two computers talking to each other and that shouldn’t count towards anything.
I fall into the other camp.
I have found FT-8 to be a whole lot of fun, and I have learned a lot as an operator and improved my skills by learning how to get the most out of it.
So, whilst I understand the objections to FT-8, I do not agree. I genuinely enjoy it as do thousands of other FT-8 operators around the world. So, something about it is appealing to a lot of operators.
Objection: “FT-8 isn’t REAL ham radio.”
Defense: Ever since ham radio got its start, every new technology that’s been introduced has been labelled at least temporarily as not real ham radio. When single sideband transmission (SSB) was authorized for amateur radio use, some operators thought that using SSB was cheating because it wasn’t the purest form of ham radio, CW, or continuous wave transmission, the OG of ham radio modes.
Since then, there have been many other modes authorized on ham radio frequencies and most have gone through the same “it’s cheating” criticism until meeting with wide acceptance.
Bottom line: if it’s authorized on the worldwide ham radio frequencies, it’s just as real as CW, SSB or earth-moon-earth. (Yes, that’s a thing.)
Objection: “There’s no operating going on. It’s completely automated.
Defense: Operating a ham radio station involves a multitude of tasks including but not limited to adjusting output power, changing frequencies, listening before you transmit, and adjusting these and other parameters to get the signal through with minimal power, no interference, and courtesy for other operators.
In my FT-8 experience, limited though it is, I’ve had to learn to operate my rigs carefully, making certain to listen before I allow the computer to key up the transmitter. I’ve had to learn how to choose frequencies and power levels correctly, while adjusting receive gain, bandwidth and other parameters that help get the message through. The difference is that I am using a computer to do some – not all – of the adjustments. Note that I can adjust power and frequency while making sure that I don’t overlap other hams using FT-8. (Click to make this image more readable.)
You are still required to operate your radio in accordance with FCC rules and regulations just as you would with voice or CW transmissions. But, instead of a microphone or morse code keyer, you’re using a computer.
As well, if an operator really DOES automate the FT-8 process, which is not permitted, they are violating FCC regulations. FT-8 does not automate ham radio. You still must operate responsibly the way you would for any other mode.
Objection: “It’s too easy to make lots of contacts. Doing it with SSB or CW is much harder and besides that’s real ham radio.”
Defense: Ok, it IS true that it’s easier to make lots of contacts using FT-8. But why is this a bad thing? Don’t we want people to be active in ham radio? Don’t we want all the hams to be successful?
Yes. Yes, we do.
It doesn’t cheapen your ARRLDX Century Club (DXCC) award that you earned using voice or code. The DXCC award has multiple categories. If you have one with CW and voice that’s wonderful and I am impressed. (Yes, favorably!) But those DXCC awards based solely on FT-8 QSLs is so noted on the award certificate. It is not precisely the same award.
Here are some of the reasons why I enjoy FT-8 and why it’s so useful for me:
1. I am hard of hearing and even with hearing aids and headphones, I can’t always make out what other hams are saying if conditions are bad. If my ears were better, I would be able to, but they’re not. FT-8 gives me the opportunity to make contacts and be competitive with other hams because I am not struggling to hear speech that others can hear easily. Using FT-8 means I get to play ham radio with everyone else.
2. FT-8 is what’s known as a weak signal mode. That means that a computer running FT-8 can “hear” and decode messages that are undetectable to the average human ear. That means for me that with a limited antenna system, I can reach out farther than I could using voice. Weak signal modes like FT-8 give me a greater reach with the equipment I can afford. More ham radio bang for my ham radio dollar.
3. Ham radio has a reputation for being an old technology used by old men.
They’re half right. Most ham radio operators are older. One only need attend a local ham radio club meeting to confirm these demographics. It’s considered an old man’s hobby.
As you know by now, I am a computer geek. Computer message exchange modes like FT-8 and others bring ham radio into the 21st century. I can send email messages, images, digital files like word processing files, and other data via ham radio. Plus – and this is its real strength for me – using these digital modes allow me to meld both ham radio and computer geekdom into one. It’s the best of both worlds and making it all work together is a blast!
Here’s a photo of my computer desk/radio shack at home:
Sidebar: I’ve always believed that the nexus of computers and ham radio is the perfect entry point for young people to enter the ham radio world. Young students in electrical engineering and computer science programs are perfect for ham radio. It would give them practical experience in radio transmission and reception hardware, antenna theory, analog and digital modulation modes, among others. Using FT-8 is just one of many ways to integrate computers into ham radio, making it more attractive and available to young operators.
4. I can help other operators worldwide. FT-8 software such as WSJT-X or JDTX can report back to a central server which plots out where FT-8 and other computer-based ham radio communications are being received. In other words, even when WSJT-X is idle, it is reporting what is being received at my location and making that information available worldwide. By leaving my radio and WSJT-X up and running, I am helping other operators learn where their signal is going and help them adjust their operations to get their intended message through. I like doing that.
Here’s an example of my spots. This shows the stations that received my FT-8 transmission just now. Note the station in South Africa:
Ham radio is what you make of it. Ham radio means to you whatever you want it to mean. If FT-8 isn’t for you, that’s ok. If, like me, you find it challenging and fun, that’s ok, too. If you believe that I’m cheating using FT-8, that’s ok. I promise I won’t think you’re cheating doing whatever it is you like doing in ham radio. And even I did, so what? You like it and that’s what really matters.
FT-8 is ham radio. It can be fun and rewarding, and I have spent many hours chasing distant stations at all hours of the day and night. It allows me to blend my love of computer and radio technology in ways that fascinate me and take up a lot of time.
You don’t have to love it. But you never know. You just might.
Not too long ago, I was asked to speak at the regular meeting of the High Technology Crime Investigation Association here on the Stark State Campus. My former professor, Glenn Goe, said that he thought that talking about my career in the IT business had some value to the student members of the association, of which I was one.
Let’s be clear – I love talking about me. I am my favorite subject. But the truth is, I didn’t have a clue about what to say. It’s not as though I have any great pearls of wisdom to offer. I’m not a deep thinker, so I figured I’d just try to be funny and, like the actor I am, wing it.
I walked into the meeting empty-handed. No speech. No script. Not even some notes from which to cobble together a coherent theme. I sat and scribbled notes in a small notebook reminiscent of the green notebook that successful Army leaders often carried around with them to take notes. (And if you must know, no I didn’t carry one around, which really does say a lot about my Army career. I probably should have.)
I wanted to talk about leadership in the IT business, but having never been a leader in the IT business, I was coming up a little short on anecdotes. With this dearth of information hanging over my head, I switched gears and talked about informal leadership in the technical world and the “Go-To Guy.”
The Go-To Guy is not in a leadership or management position, yet when people need help, they seek out the person who knows stuff, and that’s the Go-To Guy. (I’ll refer to this as the GTG from now on. Also, the GTG is a gender-neutral term, so please don’t think I’m excluding half the human population of the world.) Being the GTG knows no gender, age, race, or pizza sauce preference. It involves three things: being curious, sharing what you know, and just paying attention. I’m concentrating on the last one for the moment, but know that all three have the same priority.
The first time I recall becoming aware of how important just paying attention is was when I was stationed with the Armed Forces Network station in Bosnia in 1997.
Let me set this up.
In my freshman year in college in 1974, I decided to take Russian as my foreign language. I registered for the class and along with a half dozen of my fellow cadets, started class that fall in Hart Hall at Valley Forge Military Junior College.
Teaching the class was Lieutenant Colonel Richard M. Christenson. Lt. Col. Christenson was a very unassuming man with a quiet voice and a wicked sense of humor that he shared more freely with the half-dozen Russian students than the well over fifty students in his Western Civilization class that he also taught.
We all came to find out that Lt. Col. Christenson had been a former CIA agent who had the distinction of having his name printed in Pravda as an enemy of the Soviet state. Or something like that. His wife was also a Russian linguist, I believe. When I saw in their home the intricately hand-crocheted, throw pillow with the CIA logo on it, I knew that these people were the real deal.
Anyway, this is to say that my second-semester D in Russian was in no part due to Lt. Col. Christenson. It was all me. 100%. And I told him so when I informed him that I wasn’t going to be taking the second two semesters of Russian in my Sophomore year since the D wouldn’t transfer. He said it was “refreshing” that I owned up to my lousy academic discipline and, with a smile, declared me a “defector”.
I liked the classes and speaking the language, but writing it was a real bitch. I didn’t do the homework as I should have and that led to my handwriting in Russian looking like that of a Russian kindergartener that’s had too much caffeine. The harder it got, the more I hated doing the homework, conjugating verbs, declining nouns and the like, and mastering the cursive version of the Russian letter pronounced “shcha,” (щ). I pretty much stopped doing homework.
But I paid attention when I was in class.
Fast forward to 1997. I am in a Humvee in full battle gear, a 9-millimeter round in the chamber of my pistol in the holster on my shoulder. We were convoying from Eagle Base near Tuzla to one of the bases in the town of Doboj, I believe. At the time, all of the shops and buildings that had signs on them were all in the Cyrillic alphabet – the one that I was supposed to have learned in my unsuccessful two semesters of Russian more than twenty years before.
I looked at the signs, and while I couldn’t read them directly, I recognized the letters and was able to sound out three or four signs as we passed through the heart of the town on our way to the SFOR base. I remember exclaiming “That sign says ‘Library!’” after sounding out the Cyrillic letters that sounded much like “biblioteka,” библиотека. I sounded out a few more words, one of which I think was апотека, which when transliterated sounds a little like “apothecary,” an archaic word that means a person who prepared and sold medicines and drugs. It was a pharmacy! The Bosnian version of CVS, I suppose.
That was the moment. The world changed for me and while those two words and a few others were all I could muster out of my cobweb-infested memory of Russian vocabulary, it was enough. That was when I realized that I had paid enough attention in Russian class to have some practical application half a world away twenty two years later. I had actually learned something in a class in which I did horribly.
All because I just paid attention. I didn’t do the homework. I didn’t study like a maniac. I just paid attention.
Another story from Bosnia I’ll quote here from a previous blog post:
Sidebar: Back then, the Russians weren’t enemies. They were allies in the NATO Stabilization Force and hence, our friends. We even socialized from time to time.
“The Russian PAO major, whose name I regrettably have forgotten, came to the radio station with his interpreter to conduct business of some sort. Summoning up all the courage I had, I said hello to him in Russian based on what I remembered from college over twenty years before. The Russian major’s eyes lit up. He smiled broadly, excitedly shook my hand and said through his interpreter, “You greeted me in our language!” It was a magnificent moment for me and proved to me that you don’t necessarily have to have perfect grades to get something valuable out of academics. You just need to pay attention.”
Countless times since then, I’ve had the need for some trivial information, and lo and behold, it is right there in my cobweb-infested memory of whatever subject in school –- or life — applied. I’ve used ratio and proportion to reduce the size of a recipe, trigonometry to find a misplaced satellite 23,340 miles away, and contributed positively to two lives all because I paid attention in the Army’s suicide prevention classes.
So pay attention. Yeah, you think you’ll never need to know something and you’re probably right. Then again, I never thought I’d be in a town in which all the signs used an alphabet that was completely different from my own. Yet, there I was, delighting in the joy of understanding something I thought had long been forgotten, and filled with gratitude for Lt. Col. Christenson. Defector or not, you had a positive influence on my life all because I just paid attention.
Back in this post, we celebrated the landing of NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover launch and landing. NASA created a program by which the names of individuals here on Earth could be etched on a chip and sent to Mars as part of Perseverance. We submitted the names of the folks in the household and now our four names are among 1.2 million of our closest friends’ names on Mars.
NASA is at it again with their Europa Clipper mission scheduled for launch in October, 2024. Since I egregiously failed to include my sons, Jonathon and Andrew Wolfe in the previous mission, I made sure to not just add these fine gentlemen to the list of names destined for Europa, but gave them top billing in the gallery below.
From NASA’s website, “[The Europa Clipper’s] three main science objectives are to understand the nature of the ice shell and the ocean beneath it, along with the moon’s composition and geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.
“NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft will perform dozens of close flybys of Jupiter’s moon Europa, gathering detailed measurements to investigate the moon. The spacecraft, in orbit around Jupiter, will make nearly 50 flybys of Europa at closest-approach altitudes as low as 16 miles (25 kilometers) above the surface, soaring over a different location during each flyby to scan nearly the entire moon.
“Europa shows strong evidence for an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust. Beyond Earth, Europa is considered one of the most promising places where we might find currently habitable environments in our solar system. Europa Clipper will determine whether there are places below Europa’s surface that could support life.“
It will be an honor to accompany the Europa Clipper to the outer reaches of our Solar System. It will be an even greater honor to be with the family for all time one more time.
Here’s another in a series of posts I’m going to make when I find some of these treasures. Some will be captioned, others will not. The only criteria for posting in this series is that:
a.) I’m in the photo or…
b.) … I took the photo.
Photo from Hamvention 2022, the world’s largest ham radio convention. From left, Chris Kavanaugh, Jeff Tobin (KC3NJE), me (KN4FYR), and Donovan Wheatley (KE8TKI).
Here’s a remarkable birthday gift from sons Jon and Andy. It’s Bluetooth, it’s sturdy, and it’s a great gift! I love it!
Another birthday gift, this time from Jeff Tobin, KC3NJE. Jeff scored a vintage D-104 ham radio microphone like this one for himself some months ago and I’ve been crazy jealous. For my birthday and just before Hamvention, Jeff gifted me a D-104 of my very own! I was excited, humbled, and grateful for the magnificent gift.
View from my former front porch of the fireworks display, part of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Induction Week activities here in the Canton, Ohio area.
