Updates on things….
Some updates to the site this month….
Sunday was my 50th birthday. Wow. Half a century. Doesn’t seem like I’ve been around that long. It also happens that my wife and I were married thirty years ago, on my birthday so, we celebrated both my birthday and our wedding anniversary.
I bought my wife a pretty diamond ring, and made a joke about it… it is one of those three-diamond sets, with a meaning of “Past, Present, Future”. She asked me what if I knew what it meant, and I said, “Sure. One diamond for each decade,” and grinned at her. She was kind of amused. 
For my Birthday though, I got a neat little radio. She let me pick it out, because she is never sure what sort of electronic gadgets I want or will use. I don’t pick her clothes out, and she doesn’t pick out radios. Even though she too, is a ham radio operator, she prefers I take the time to do the research on the electronics. That’s good with me though.
The radio is pretty cool. It’s a Yaesu VX-7RB. It has four bands one can transmit on, the 6M (50 Mhz), 1.2M (220 Mhz), 2M (144 Mhz) and the 70 cm (440) bands. The receiver is wideband and can receive from approximately 500Khz to around 1 gigahertz. Typical of idiotic laws in the United States (due to a senator being overheard breaking the law way back when) cellular frequencies are blocked.
Short of the blocked cell frequencies, I can scan a whole lot of spectrum with this radio, pick up some of the local police and fire (mostly they are on digital trunking now in my region though), weather frequencies (including an emergency alert), multiple programable channels (around 1000), and it picks up shortwave too. Cool radio.
The wife is practicing her testing this last month and is going in on Saturday to upgrade from Novice to at least Technician class. That will at least get her on 2m with me now. We’re supposed to be attending local emergency communications training in September as well, for ARES.
