This is a mish-mosh of notes, which is what happens when you spend a weekend moving furniture and fixing cars instead of playing with radios.

A Christmas Story Movie Amateur Radio Connection

Jean Shepard, W9QWN and K2ORS, was the narrator and co-scripter of A Christmas Story.  He got his start at WSAI-AM in Cincinnati in 1948.  From 1951 to 1953, he went to KYW in Philadephia, after which he returned to Cincinnati at WLW.

Talk To Santa Nets

For the 8th consecutive year, the 3.916 Nets will be giving good boys and girls a chance to talk to Santa Claus via the magic of ham radio.   The ‘3916 Santa Nets’ will be held on 15 different evenings starting Friday, November 29 through Christmas Eve, December 24th.    The Santa Nets are open to all licensed amateur radio operators who wish to invite kids to their shack to talk to Santa.  Third party rules will apply. LINK.

Christmas Short Story

Larry Makoski wrote another installment of his Christmas story from last year.  This one is in five parts (so far, I admit that when I’m writing this the last two released parts are still queued in the Press App on my phone!).  I’d give it 5 stars.  Link to part 1.  Link to part 1 of last year’s story.

WATwitter Christmas Edition

I hope to be on the air during the holiday break.  Watch for me on twitter, and watch for others using the #WATwitter hashtag.

Additionally, I may get on for Straight Key Night.  If I do, I’ll turn the power down to limit the amount of people abused by my CW “skills” 😉

QST

I have several projects “incubating”.  The most prominent is the EasyLogger with the WF32.  I have another ‘on the brew’ that is more interesting and useful.  I also saw an interesting use of a PIC12 that I may extend to a PIC16 (since I have one that has no use… yet).  There are several radio projects coming as well.  2014 will be an interesting year on this blog.

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This is Thanksgiving week in the USA, so the family and I spent some time putting up the Christmas tree, since some of our Thanksgiving guests may not have a chance to come by during the Christmas season (or at least before we clean up the tree).

I decided years ago to move all our Christmas lights to LEDs for several reasons, the reduced current consumption is one of them.  The problem that created for us is that our LEDs are too large to fit into some of the ornaments that we have.  My wife brought one of those to my attention and I decided to fix the problem using a Stellaris Launchpad that was collecting dust in the basement.

I took a telephone cable and soldered an RGB LED to one end and a plug to the other end that would connect to the ground (through a 330 ohm resistor) and three of the analog pins on the Launchpad.

The code is below:

The final result is:

Nothing like using a very complex tool for something very simple!

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