HPR4717: Visit with a blind Ham operator

Hi, this is Archer72 for another episode of Hacker Public Radio.

In this episode, it is my first experience troubleshooting with an experienced blind Ham operator who is located 20 miles away from my hometown.

When traveling there, I could not miss his house, which was the only one off the main road with an estimated 50 foot antenna. That’s 15 meters for the rest of the world. This antenna was intended for the HF high frequency band, for which the local Ham radio club had very recently extended to this height. The target radio bands are 20, 40 and 80 meters.

I had missed a great opportunity to record the session so wanted record (and write this) while it was fresh on my mind.

Several months later…

This particualar operator (KG4QWH) (Kilo-Golf-Four-Quebec-Whiskey-Hotel) was a radio operator for the local emergency services for 22 years, after which the new company decided to cut back on staff. A local broadcast radio station was hiring soon after and was using some version of Linux which was not accessible for a blind user like himself. This conversation was started after I was asked about his computer that he was trying to force update on older hardware from Windows (7?) to Windows 11, in true hacker fashion. While talking about the Linux situation and also the Windows side, it brough to light the glaring (near) ommision of accessibility software in both camps.

On the Windows side, which is more familiar to my friend, is Jaws. Great software, but year after year the barrier of cost is getting more, and on the Linux side accessibility is not looking any better. While cost is not a factor in using it, and this is only coming from me, the voices could be better. Piper is an option for natural sounding voices, but has yet to be integrated into a FOSS screen reader AFAIK.

On the positive side of accessibility, the Kenwood radio (model TS-590S) has the option to add a module to give an audible description of the buttons being pressed, and at the time there was gnother operator who came through and talk him through some receiver settings.

The reason I went there is the first place was that the Kenwood microphone was causing noise to come across the speaker when he keyed up the mic.

Initially the proprosed solution was to switch two wires inside the Kenwood microphone. I was asked about this ahead of time so was prepared with an electrical box with miscellaneous low voltage wires and stripping tool, also a Pincil soldering iron equiped with a USB C 100 watt power supply.

To fix the problem on the Kenwood MC-60 microphone, you need to swap the wires so that mic hi is on Pin 1 and mic low (shield) is on Pin 7. This is often necessary due to factory wiring errors.

After finding out that the proposed solution was to open the mic, which required a heat gun the soften the locktight, I tried another route. My friend had a toroid choke handy, and I coiled the feed line to the back of the radio around the toroid. (8 - 10 times?) This had no effect. Next to try was to ground the mic from the outside, which there was a bare metal screw on. This connected to a dedicated ground on the back of the Kenwood TS-590S radio.