Month: January 2021

Amateur Radio in the Days of Covid

A year ago, I volunteered to serve as the president of the Cascades Amateur Radio Society (CARS).  I’ve been a ham about 11 years, but it’s not really my primary hobby or technological love (I’m still a Technician Class operator).  But I’ve VERY much been taken by the community and the history of the radio…

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1000 FT8 Contacts in 14 days

As a new ham, there are many projects and areas of this hobby that I want to jump into all at once, and the idea of exchanging world wide digital text messages via the FT8 mode was one of the first.  Make no mistake, though the amateur radio community might downplay the significance of ‘just…

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Scanned Data — Part 2

In the first part (What is a “Scanned Data” Utility, Anyhow) we learned about the concept of quickly and conveniently transcribing plot data into a tabular form with precision. In this second part we will examine the use of a recommended scanned data utility—Plot Digitizer by Joseph Huwaldt. The first step in our examination of…

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What is a “Scanned Data” Utility, Anyhow?

In the process of characterizing a physical device or process, the original performance specifications are published in a plot format such as illustrated in Figure 1. But suppose you need to have the data in a tabular format such as that of Table 1. How do you go about doing the conversion? The most obvious…

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