Palms West Amateur Radio Club

Original Story 10/1/2025Updated 10/2/2025 (CORES is not available for new registrants)A bulletin sent to members of ARRL The National Association for Amateur Radio® included information about the impact of the US Government shutdown on licensing for the Amateur Radio Service.The government shutdown began at 12:01 Eastern time on Wednesday, October 1, 2025, when Congress had not passed an approp... [...]

Hurricane Imelda, now a strong Category 1 storm, is forecast to make landfall on, or come extremely close to Bermuda, late Wednesday evening into early Thursday morning. The Hurricane Watch Net (HWN) will activate for the first time this season beginning Wednesday, October 1, 2025, at 3:00 PM EDT (1900 UTC).Activation times and frequencies are as follows:3:00 PM EDT (1900 UTC) on 14.325 MHz7:00... [...]

ARRL The National Association for Amateur Radio® needs every radio amateur in the United States to send letters to Washington as we continue our nationwide grassroots campaign to pass the Amateur Radio Emergency Preparedness Act. The process is simple: click the button at www.arrl.org/HOA, put in your call sign, and press the red SEND MY LETTERS button. It takes mere seconds!The letters will au... [...]

Or “The One-Transistor Regen That Turned Into A Two-Transistor Regen” with thanks to G3XBM and N0WVA. (Note – if reading this post on a computer, you can click on any of the images for a slightly larger version.) About 10 years ago, Doug N0WVA told me about an impressive little regen he had built with […] [...]

Recently, I built a simple little TRF receiver for the AM broadcast band using a TA7642, a modern equivalent for a chip that was quite popular with electronics homebrewers in the 70’s and 80’s. The ZN414 was a device made by the British semiconductor company Ferranti. Housed in a metal TO-18 can with three leads, […] [...]

My last project, a Norcal 2N2/20 kit build, which also involved a partial scratch-build of the same circuit, rather took it out of me. As a result, I’ve been revisiting some of the circuits I built in my pre-teen years. Giving myself permission to play around with simple circuits is really fun, as well as […] [...]

My continued apologies to long-term blog readers, most of whom are probably more interested in posts detailing my builds of QRP ham radio projects. This will probably be my last post on micropower Part 15 broadcasting for a while, as my interests have shifted back towards QRP ham radio. I just completed a rather nifty […] [...]

14 years ago (where does the time go?) I was looking for a way to broadcast very locally, to my neighborhood, legally. The operative word was legally and, somehow, I discovered the world of Part 15 broadcasting on the AM broadcast band. FCC regulations under Part 15 allow for a wide variety of unlicensed devices […] [...]