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Showing posts from July, 2025

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License Plate Website Update

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     It's almost been three years since I decided to abandon my   paid web host  and moved my  website over to Blogger. I realized I hadn't really explored the "pages " feature that  creates single pages you can link to like regular pages on a website. At first I was hesitant because I wanted to keep my HTML coding skills up to par, but I am just happy to get it back !!  I will continue to write about the ALPCA Conventions on here but have an index of all license plate writing on there. .I also plan to cross-post  both blogs. I also have links to the license plate collectors' eBay handles and the "What We Collect" pages from my old site!! The link is http://plates.justinmattes.com

Simply Simplex-- Part 1

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On April 29th I celebrated 25 years in ham radio!  So I have doing a series of blog entries to celebrate the achievement! I will highlight a few accomplishments.     It happened again, I made a simplex contact  from about 80 miles away. Not exactly a record but still pretty decent.  This isn't my first major contact but every simplex contact is special. It's a sign my radio and antenna are receiving, and more importantly transmitting properly. Ever since I  got my license twenty five years ago, I have been fascinated with simplex more than repeaters. For those who don't know the difference between a repeater is a machine usually in a high building or other structure that receives on one frequency and transmits on another.  With simplex it's just one frequency, direct from radio to radio  line of site. There are atmospheric conditions that can increase the distanced, that's call ducting and there's a map on the Internet that shows  the conditi...