Joined the ARRL

I joined the ARRL. Because my employer matches charitable donations over $50 I joined for 3 years so that my deductible amount was $66 so that they could match it. After a few emails I think it actually happened. There's a lot to read in QRZ magazine which I now get every month and I tend to always learn something from it so I'm enjoying it a lot. Plus it amuses my wife to see pictures of people on extreme DXpeditions. I like that the ARRL is looking out for ham frequencies and keeping ontop of the political side of things.

My First Radio

My First Ham radio arrived today!

After consulting with my Uncle G4HON, I was advised that ICOM HT's are the bees knees so I ordered this as soon as I got back from vacation. I found the best price online at GigaParts, it was about $280 shipped, far more than the original budget of around $100 for a police scanner!

Now I need to wait for it to charge and to read the manual a lot and work out how to use the darn thing.

I already found a list of local repeaters so I can program those into the memory settings.

Got my license today

I just noticed on the fcc site that my license was issued today!

Say hello to KI6QNY what an awful call sign, I'm going to have to do something about that. I checked out the available call signs and like the look of K8ARK since it has my initials and of the available ARK's this was in West Virginia (good mountain biking) rather than New York (likely someone else will want it there more than West Virginia). It would have been better to have K6ARK, then my region number would be accurate, but you can't have everything.