Hello, I'm AlexofAz. I'm active in backpacking and amateur radio and enjoy combining those hobbies with public service such as supporting the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts for JOTA and am interested in emergency communications. I particularily enjoy the outdoors; backpacking, camping, driving back roads and operating ham radios. I also like to geek out a bit with Linux. I've always recycled my old Windows boxes into Linux machines and am now having a lot of fun and function with Raspberry Pi's.
The only exercise that keeps my interest is walking and I like to walk a lot! I walk in deserts, in forest, over mountains, along streams and anywhere my mood takes me. For more information about some of my favorite walks, please visit my backpacking page.
I'm also a licensed ham, that's an amature radio operator. One of my favorite things to do is grab a 500' roll of stranded 12 guage wire from my local hardware store and start cutting antennas. I build dipoles, end fed dipoles, inverted V dipoles, near vertical incididence skywave dipoles, 1/4 wavelength ground planes, which are really just a fancy dipole. Hmmm, I really like dipoles; linked dipoles, off center fed dipoles, yagis... well, a yagi is a beam, not a dipole, but I like building those as well. Anyway, you get the drift, I'm an antenna builder.
I like to operate portable, in other words, take all the radio gear out to the feild and set it up. There's several events that focus on portable operations, like Field Day, and Winter Field Day and, well really anyday can be feild day if you like to work portable. One great form of portable operation is SOTA, or summits on the air. In SOTA you climb to a mountain top, set up your radio and antenna, and talk to someone on another mountain top. Boy is that fun!
Made 23 October 2016