eric Webb KE7NLU
How I got started in radio: I was the kid that was more interested in taking my toys apart to see how they worked than I was playing with them. My biggest interest in radio at that time was to build a crystal radio. It seemed amazing to me that I could listen to an AM radio station without batteries, and the radio could be built with only a coil of wire, a variable capacitor, and a germanium diode. At Radio Shack I
acquired all the parts for my crystal radio, wound different coils and began my exciting adventure into making the radio. It took me a few tries of looking at different designs and winding multiple coils to get the inductance and capacitance to be resonant at the AM frequencies, but I finally got it to work. Hearing the faint drawl of some twangy country music in the earphone, I was hooked. In high school my radio interest continued as I wanted to be able to contact my buddies while driving around. Cell phones at the time were in their infancy and certainly would not fit into my high school budget, where a $0.50 pop every day was a big decision. To solve the communication conundrum I looked into CB radio as a solution. The timing was perfect! CB radio was well played out and I could usually find a radio and sometimes an included antenna in the infamous random box of wires that every garage sale seems to have. My buddies and I became frequent garage sale shoppers and were soon chatting it up. I splurged and got an SWR meter so I could tune all the antennas. This led me into the career path of electronics. I got my AAS degree in electronics from the Helena College of Technology in 2000 and started my career path in Billings servicing video lottery machines. This was not the most fulfilling job, working in smoke-filled casinos, so I applied and was hired by the company Dynojet Research, an aftermarket motorsports performance company. In this job I was able to learn and work my way into electrical engineering, learning how to write embedded firmware, layout circuit boards, and write software. This was a great place to work, but the entrepreneurial side of me kicked in, and I started my own power sports products e-commerce business and electronic design consulting business. The days of crystal radios and CBs were a distant memory, until in 2007 a co-worker at Dynojet was talking about amateur radio and suggested I should get a license. I was doing a lot of backwoods ATV riding and camping trips and I thought I would have better peace of mind if I had a backup communication plan in out-of-reach places. I got my tech ticket in 2007 and really didn’t use the radio that much. I checked into the Bozeman net every now and again, more or less to see if the radio was still working, and I monitored the repeater, but it just didn’t seem like a lot was happening with radio. In 2019 I got a few SDR radios and that re-kindled my interest in radio. I used my SDR radios to scan the HF bands and listen to some interesting nightly rag chews, but the digital modes piqued my curiosity. I just had to figure out what all those weird whirring beeping tones were and how to decode them. I did a little research which led me to FLDIGI, WSJTX, and other random digital mode software. Getting a handle on the workings of some of these digital modes, frequencies, and bands made me want to go from spectator only to eligible participant status, so I studied and got my general early 2021. What are your Favorite Radio Activities: TRIVIA TRIVIA TRIVIA.. This really sparked the radio bug not only for me but my wife Stacy KK7CJV. One random Sunday night last fall we were at our house here in Townsend that we are refurbishing and I was monitoring the CCARC Belmont repeater as I usually do while we are up here working, and we again heard the trivia game hosted by John Monson(AJ7MT). Stacy blurted out, Don’t you have a call sign? I know the answer! I answered the question and the rest is history. We have been sincerely enjoying playing this game since that Sunday night and are very happy to be a part of this welcoming group of people in the CCARC. This summer I would also like to host a fox hunt using a fox radio I’m building. I haven’t ever participated in one, however I think it would be a lot of fun and a great learning experience. My radios and shack. Right now I have radios but no proper shack or room. The shack right now consists of an FT-991A precariously placed by the coffee pot on the corner of a kitchen countertop with coax cables running under the door. The 2m antenna is a homebrew J-pole bolted to a dead tree about 250 feet up a hill from the house. The HF antenna is right out back off the deck strung between a deer blind and a chicken coop that was left here on the property when we got it. Radio Collection: 2- FT991A “shack in a box” 1- VX6R 1- VX7R 1-AnyTone 878 1-FT5D 2-FT2980’s 10 plus - Random pile of various model Baofengs for one-time use projects and experiment radios. My goals in radio: Radio is the only real time long distance method of communication that does not require the use of a service provider or public utility, nor does it incur any monetary fee beyond the purchase of the equipment and getting a license. My goal is to become a VE, learn and contribute to this hobby to help preserve and promote amateur radio for future generations. See Eric's Fox in a Box radio design here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kED9NXrQxlMloKuOaS-Bz_ASVbU04QTH7R_JvbwCWgk/edit?usp=sharing April 2022 |
Eric's shack
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