Give yourself a break!

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Over the past weeks, actually, probably months, the push to talk button on the radio I use for my weekly discussion net has been acting up. In the middle of an over it would sometimes cut-out for no particular reason. Being mindful and pushing harder didn't seem to make a blind bit of difference and no amount of fiddling with the cable helped either.

Today I finally combined the act of remembering that this was a problem, with the availability of a spare moment, a passing level of personal health and no local distractions and as a bonus, you, or more accurately, my weekly article. As you might imagine, this is no mean feat and it doesn't happen very often, months apart, if not more, in this case.

My first effort was to find my radio box. Except for the serial numbers, I have two visually identical boxes. One of them is sitting on a cupboard in my shack. I opened it up and the microphone I was hoping for, wasn't there. As you might gather, I have two radios. One is for my shack, the other for the car and portable operation, though currently that too is in the shack, connected to a separately purchased DTMF microphone. This means that I actually have three microphones, and thus the reason for hunting for the other box.

As it turns out, it's safely stored in the garage where after squeezing between several recycling bins, shuffling between crates and shelving, lifting and moving several boxes, it revealed its, temporary, well several years now, storage location. I retrieved the box, put everything else back where I found it, then brought the box into the shack and promptly started sneezing, because dust and allergies. Opening the box confirmed that my brain is still, at least partially, functioning, since the microphone I remembered being stored there was in fact exactly where I thought it would be.

I swapped out the microphone, turned on the radio, tested it with a repeater kerplunk and called it done. In the process of removing the "faulty" microphone I noticed that the cable appeared to be swapped end-for-end. I don't know if that was the root cause of the issue, but the confluence of factors for this adventure ran out, so that's a project for future me. I did find a sandwich bag to put the microphone into and labelled it as being possibly suspect, noted that I swapped the cable end-for-end, but left it untested. I can remember some stuff, but obviously I'm not as smart as you think I am.

So .. why am I telling you this in so many words? It occurred to me that all too often we look at others asking ourselves "why didn't you fix that, it's so easy", when the reality might be somewhat different. In my case, there's plenty of moving parts, some of which actively get in the way, some passively. In this case a seemingly simple task took well over an hour, rather than the 15 minutes I'd budgeted for.

Next time it's fine to give yourself some slack and take a moment, rather than beat yourself up about something you failed to achieve. You need to keep reminding yourself that amateur radio is a hobby, not a profession and progress can be made one step at a time.

Time will tell if I fixed my microphone issue or just took a step on the troubleshooting path.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB