New beginnings, new things, more to come hopefully

Hey all! It's Ria here, and I'm going to be blogging about my ham stuff here. Stay tuned!

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New video on YouTube - connector wrapup (for now)

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 I'm wrapping up the preliminary series on coax connectors. Reason being that I want to cover a few more topics, and also get a few other pieces in which can get me to do some more in-depth topics. So enjoy the last one, for now... I talk a little about my wardriving days, and wifi antennas. Remember - ham radio is a cool hobby, but it's not the only hobby radio out there! I used to be (and still am!) very much enthused by experimenting with license-free radio services. There is a certain crossover with those that I'd like to cultivate both in my  videos and in the community.  Next I'm going to cover using Linux and MacOS in the hamshack. Should be fun. :)
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Contesting and DXing - no shame here.

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One of the things I'd like to touch on here is that my opponent and his friends seem to think that the message that "contesters and DXers are elitists" is a winning strategy with the ham radio public. For the record, I am a very avid and active DXer and contester. I have 324 countries confirmed (326 including deleted), 9 bands DXCC including 160 meters and DXCC challenge at the 1500 level. I also have numerous contest wins, both on my own and on VHF with Andrea, K2EZ who owns and operates a Ford Explorer rover. Interestingly enough, my opponent is also a DXer and contester. In fact, he is even on the DXCC honor roll. This means that he is in the top 10% of DXers worldwide in terms of new countries worked. Wow. It takes a lot of dedication to do that. He's also a member of the Order of Boiled Owls of New York, a well known, but small contest club. So as it turns out, he's one of us, and in some respects more elite than I am. I sincerely don't get why he g
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Flex Radio 1.10.8 (Beta) and Serial port support

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Along with my Flex-6700, I also have other pieces of gear in my station including a SteppIR SDA100 antenna controller and a SPE Expert 1.3K-FA legal limit amplifier. Flex recently made available SmartSDR 1.10.8 software.  It promised some exciting features, but especially exciting was the support for USB serial ports for band data. While publicly available, it is a beta version, so proceed with caution. The actual procedure of installing it is straightforward. Just run the installer and accept all of the defaults. I chose to uninstall v1.9.13 before I installed 1.10.8 so I can have a clean install.  When that is done and you first run a new version of SmartSDR it will ask you to update the radio's firmware, which you have to do in order to run SmartSDR with the radio. The radio update went fine until it gave me a cryptic "file transfer error" which I am guessing is the firmware not being successfully loaded to the radio. I clicked the "update" button again
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