I am very sad to report that John Bartscherer, N1GNV, better known as John Bee, of Meriden CT, owner of Quicksilver Radio Products, passed away on Friday October 23rd, 2025. John and I attended many of the same hamfests. I sent as many customer to him as he did to me. I will miss seeing him. My condolences to his family, his friends, and to his employees.
A lot of you new POTA operators who are new to solar have been asking me for instructions on how to connect the bits and pieces involved in getting solar involved in you activations. Here it is as simple as I can make it. There will be more to follow
The Quansheng is the latest wonder radio and I will have a some available for sale at Hamvention. I have been playing with it for the last few weeks and I find it easier to use and a lot more user friendly than the Baofeng, The ability to potentially receive SSB with an add-on board is very intriguing.
Here are a couple of links that you will need to get the full potential from this radio. First off, is the support page from the manufacturer. The two files you want are OEM CSP software for programing and the other is the other is the update for the firmware. The stock firmware is not compatible with CHIRP, the go to radio programming software.
Second, you may want to change the radio’s firmware. I chose EGZUMER v0.22 for my radio. You can read more about it and its features by doing a search of EGZUMER on google.
I used the OEM firmware loader to upload the firmware BIN file. The browser loader works with CHROME based browsers (I use Firefox).
Download EGZUMER v0.22 here https://github.com/egzumer/uv-k5-firmware-custom/releases
Download OEM programming along with the firmware loader here: http://qsfj.com/support/downloads/3002
The question my customers ask most often is “How long will my battery run my radio?” The answer can be found on the charts on the document below. Lick on the link to open the Duty Cycle PDF. It has both the 80/20 and 50/50 duty cycles on one PDF.
My old pace trailer has been around as long as Hamsource, 16 years. In that time the Pace trailer has been put through its paces (sorry for the pun). It has been up and down the East Coast From Maine to Florida, multiple trips to Hamvention, as well as hamfests in Texas and Alabama. As my inventory and product line grew the 12x7x7 trailer seemed to shrink. Packing up after shows had become a not so fun game of Tetris! This week I finally bit the bullet and purchased a new much larger trailer. I can only hope that it will perform as well as the Pace trailer did. I have to give a shout out to my good friends at The Trailer Depot . They did a great job in getting the new trailer and hitch set up.
