Yesterday, my new Xiegu G90 rig showed up to my content. I was thinking of buying a small rig for field operation with the local gang, mainly SOTA, and my Icom IC-705 was too valuable to put at the service on a rough environment. So, I decided to go for the cute G90. The reason I chose this rig was because of the price. To be honest, I own more gear than I need, and spending more than 500 bucks on a radio was not in my plans.

I took a short trip to the city with the aim of conducting a brief APRS test using my Kenwood TH-D75. The test aimed to map the coverage areas of the Braga digipeater, CQ0PBR, installed on Mount Santa Marta, at an elevation of 562m ASL. Knowing in advance that the antenna was not yet in its final location due to some technical constraints, I was aware that in the more obstructed and lower areas, without a line of sight to the digi, it would be very difficult for my packets to be repeated.

Thailand’s KNACKSAT-2 satellite is preparing for launch from the International Space Station. Deployment time: February 3, 2026 at 8:55 UTC. Deployment Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB4PIOS-hSs January 27, 2026. The Thailand satellite project KNACKSAT-2 is entering a crucial phase after the satellite was successfully placed on the International Space Station in late 2025. The launch date has been confirmed for February 3, 2026 at 8:55 UTC. After deployment successful. please help to receive telemetry on downlink frequency 400.

I got my Hack RF Pro today and the first thing I checked was if there was a new firmware version available. I went to the Releases Page and saw that the latest version (2026.01.2) has some important bug fixes. It is a firmware bug fix release. There are no changes to host software. Changes in the release include: Fixed RX, TX, and self-test on rad1o. Fixed intermittent tuning failures with SDR++.

On December 27th 2025, I and a group of fellow hams went to Parque Natural do Alvão to activate one of its highest peaks, Vaqueiro, 1311m ASL. The weather conditions were rough, with lots of snow and wind. The team was composed by myself, CT1ETE, CT2IWW (Paulo), CT7ALW (Rui) and CR7BWZ (Henrique). Map of Vaqueiro The journey began early in the morning with a car trip of about 50km to the destination park.

I got an email from VE2ZDX, one of my latest POTA QSOs. I was surprised by how interesting this is. The subject of the email was “CT1ETE, watch your QSOs from the other side!”. Then, there’s a link that says “Watch the videos!”. Ofc that the first thing I did was to click on the link (the source was legit to me!). I was redirected to a page where there’s an embedded Youtube video with the recording of VE2ZDX’s QSOs, and that pointed to the time of our POTA contact.

Lately, I’ve been active hunting new references in the Parks on the Air program (POTA). I reached 100 unique reference areas and I got the “Arizona Agave Award”. I want to thank all the stations who recently contacted me on 20m CW. My working conditions of the January Q’s were: RIG: Flex 6400M Antenna: Force-12 C3SS Power: 30W CW paddle: Begali HST III This is the beautiful award For more info about the POTA program, go to https://pota.

According to Gardens’ page, “BOTAN is Cube Sat, a microsatellite started in April 2023 and developed by students of Chiba Institute of Technology having technical backgrounds and unique characteristics. Also, BOTAN is an educational project in order to develop high-level engineers by the Planetary Exploration Research Center (PERC)”. In Satnogs Database, one can learn that BOTAN has 3 transmitters: GMSK on 437.375 MHz; CW on 437.375 MHz; AFSK AX25 1200bd on 145.