N6QW ~ The Ham Oracle

ARRL Announces new Podcast.[BTW Michelle and Joe, your new found audience may actually want to build some hardware like this totally homebrew FT8 station . But that may put your advertisers in a snit as it means build not buy. Sorry for being so snarky!]

Boom, seems like the ARRL is trying to play catch up... A new Podcast is about to start on March 7, 2019 aimed at the new hams who have questions. It is called "So What Now".
The show premise is Michelle (the newbie) has questions of Joe (the OT) and is sponsored by LDG. Wonder what the ratio of plugging antenna tuners to actual technical content will be.
The show runner states this is the first ever podcast aimed at helping new hams (and ostensibly keeping them in the hobby). N2CQR has been doing this for over 10 years  on his Solder Smoke Podcast and for the past three years I have been riding along with Bill. So maybe ARRL is not the first.
For many segments of Bill's Podcast the subject has been the Michigan Mighty Mite …

What to do when all is does is rain?


January 20th, 2019. How to sample the S Meter readings.Below I discussed The use of the LCD display and how by sampling every time through the loop that the serial processing caused the tuning knob to be essentially put on hold. I then theorized that sampling the signal say every thirty cycles through the loop would let you have the S Meter reading while not hanging up the tuning.
Mind you I am not a programmer so my solutions often seem bizarre but they do work,

The first thing I did was to identify "p" as an integer in the forward of the sketch. I also identified oldp as a memory of the p count. like int p = 0; and int oldp = 0; In the void loop I added two lines of code The first says p = p + 1; and the second is that oldp = p; The first line simply adds the numeric 1 to the old value of p every time through the loop. Next I have a sub-routine called S Meter (CheckSM();) Thus not only is a 1 added each time but the loop checks the CheckS…

1/09/2019
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