I’ve got some sick days I need to use so I took one today and activated K-1909 Oscar Sherer State Park outside Sarasota. About a 50 minute drive to get to this one. Super nice day. This park seems like it’s mostly a rest area for the old rail line bike path. I setup inside a pavilion. It wasn’t non-stop contacts but pretty close. I got a few in California and one from Portugal. Plus a part to park contact.
A year ago today my original callsign(KX4HL) appeared in the FCC database after 9 long days of waiting. It’s been quite a year, as of this morning I have 2411 QSOs. Here’s some of my QSO cards: I’ve moved from just a wire antenna to a hex beam on the roof, put up a 2m antenna, built a AMSAT antenna. I’ve done 11 Parks on the Air activations (and doing another today at K-1909 Oscar Sherrer State Park, look for me around 14.287). I participated in winter and summer field day with the St Pete Amateur Radio Club (SPARC), there’s a meeting tonight also. Been to 9 ham fests,…
I received this QSL card today. Also put in an order for more of my own cards.
I finally got Hawaii confirmed on LoTW in the CQ WW CW contest last weekend to complete the Worked All States. I’ve gotten 3 contacts with Hawaii before this but none of them use LoTW unfortunately. My count for the triple play is 13 CW, 48 Phone and 47 Digital. Gives me something to shoot for next year.
I’m still not fast enough to decode contest callsigns in CW on the fly but I read an article about some guys who didn’t know any CW and participated in a CW contest using a decoder. The contest logging program I use, N1MM+ Logger has links to one so I tried it out. CW contests are super fun. It’s probably the fastest contacts you can make. I made 175 contacts. I definitely improved my CW skills and more importantly it’s invigorated me to keep working on it. I checked cqcontest.net where people post their live contact logs. The claimed winner, LZ5R, had 8170 contacts. This is a contest club out…
Received a QSL response from Ghana today
I did the ARRL Sweepstakes this Sunday for a few hours. Managed 92 contacts in 57 out of 83 sections. The goal is to “sweep” all 83 sections. This is another fun one I’d like to do better in next year. This exchange includes year first licensed. I made a quick graph of the distribution of years from my 92 contacts. I am an outlier.
Today I hit 100 confirmed DXCC entities, with Iceland being my last one. I almost had Iceland before with FT8, only got half the QSO with a guy named Odin before it faded. I’ve picked up the last few on 17m FT8. Now I just need someone to confirm Hawaii on LOTW and I’ll have Worked All States as well. I have a QSL card from Hawaii but the guy doesn’t use LOTW.
Received my Parks on the Air Bronze Activator certificate for activating 10 different parks today.
I didn’t realize I had Veteran’s Day off until Friday so I planned some POTA activations. I started out at K-3607 Beker Wingate Creek State Park. This is just some scrub land for hiking, not really a park. I did pretty good and made 42 contacts here. Hit behind some sort of hunting perch or something for a little shade. Nice day for it. This park is just under an hour away from my QTH. On the way back I went to K-3635 Madira Brickel Mound State Archaeological Site. The indians around here would create mounds of shells for ceremonial purposes. This…
