Lone Prairie Radio

There are times when the Internet frustrates me completely And there are other times that I thank Al Gore, or whomever, for inventing such a fascinating and amazing part of my life. Today I was surfing for something I needed in my work. Don’t quite remember how I got there but I found a very cool site that pretty much explored radio towers from the northeast. www.fybush.com. Very fun place. And lo and behold, through various searches I found a link to the FIRST radio station I worked for on his site. Yup, then it was called WAYT in Wabash, Indiana. A daytime AM kicking out a booming 250 watts (yeah, I was ALWAYS a QRP fan!) before sunset when we signed off. The building occupied about 800 square feet overlooking the Wabash River’s journey through the city of Wabash in the county of Wabash! So what was our station slogan? “On the Banks of the Wabash”. What else? Anyway the site brought back some really enjoyable (and a few not so) memories of that first experience in broadcasting. I sta...

Well, it seems quite awhile since I’ve last posted anything to the blog. Guess there’s been a lot happening. Especially with the DTV transition. I should probably talk about that sometime down the road. Guess I will. But right now, it’s nice NOT to think about it! Today, I just want to pass along what was to me, an amazing QSO on a minimal power of two watts from my Yaesu FT-817ND. I had been sorting through a few radio things and pulled my go-bag out to just dig through it briefly. For some reason, I pulled the 817 out and attached it to the stealth inverted vee wire antenna at home. It peaks at a height of maybe fifteen feet with the ends at around six feet. I tell you this just to pass along the word that it’s NOT much of a DX antenna! At any rate, I was tuning around forty meters and decided I didn’t want to compete with what I heard with my two little watts and internal battery power. So I dialed it up to twenty meter CW and tuned up. I heard a “CQ USA” coming from UA4HBW in Samar...