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…
At last weeks meeting of the SPARC Club they had a couple 2m radio, I picked up the Icom for use in my shack. Over the weekend was the yearly SPARCfest, where I picked up a 2m antenna. I put it up against my fence on some of the military camo poles I have left from Hamcation. I got on the SPARC net to try it out tonight and it worked great. Much better than trying to do it with the Baofeng HT. Here’s what the grounding panel looks like now, room for 1 more antenna (I already have the lightning arrestor for it 🙂
I entered into the WAE (Worked All Europe) RTTY contest. This one is a bit different in that you can send QTC (traffic which consists of your previous 10 QSOs) fo extra points. You get points for working anyone but you only QTC with people in a different continent so signal is important when you’re sending 10 contacts worth of info in one transmission. I made 100 contacts over the 2 days. This is another one I’d like to focus on more next year.
Now that it’s cooling off a little I’m getting out there to do some POTA activations. This weekend I did Little Manatee River State Park, about a 40 minute drive. This park seems gear toward horses but there weren’t any there this weekend so I had the horse area to myself for radio work. This was my best activation yet with 91 contacts, one from Brazil and one from Alaska.
I had a little time on Friday night and Sunday afternoon to do the CQ WW SSB contest. I ended up with 60 contacts. This is a super popular contest. It seems like there was someone calling CQ contest every 1kHz. It’s a 48 hour contest so people put up some serious numbers, claimed first place was over 7000 contacts. Next year I’d like to spend more time on it.
I got my QSL card for the Armed Forces Day crossband test. AAZ Ft Huachuca is where they guy I bought my IC-7410 from works. This wasn’t a very difficult test, basically just use split mode. It was fun to get a contact with the Pentagon and NSS, and also decoding the message in CW.
I brought my HT on vacation with me to Ireland. It was a very full vacation so I didn’t bring my HF gear. It would be a great place to activate though, maybe another time. My brother and I climbed up the mountain in Connemara National Park near Clifden. At the top I made some calls and was able to contact a guy in Cork via a linked repeater. I used callsign EI/AA0O/P. Great views.
It’s too hot for activating parks in Florida so I went on the road. I was heading to a music festival and made some stops on the way to activate a few parks. Unfortunately there was flooding in the town next to the music festival which contaminated the water and they were forced to cancel the festival. Huge bummer, but at least I got in some camping and ham radio. First I activated Uwharrie National Forest in North Carolina. I stayed at the West Morris Mountain campground. There were only two other people there and one of them was heading to the same music festival. He ended up meeting up…
