June 30, 2019

POTA K-3615 Dade Battlefield Historic State Park

I’ve seen the sign for this park many times on the way to my parents house. I left a little earlier on this trip to beat the heat and give a little extra time for an activation. This way my first real test of the Wolf River Coil I picked up at Hamvention. Band conditions have been really poor lately so I can’t say if my signal reports were bad because of the antenna or just condx. I got a couple 59’s out of 12 contacts but most were 33 and 44 or 53. The antenna is much less obtrusive than the 40ft pole I’ve been using but I wouldn’t…

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written by AA0O - Posted in Antennas, Parks on the Air

June 23, 2019

2019 ARRL Field Day and my 100th blog post

This weekend was ARRL Field Day. This is also my 100th blog post, Yay! I was on the committee for Field Day this year. We had conference calls and did a dry run to make sure we had all the connectors and accessories we needed. Quite a bit of planning is required to make this event go smoothly. It was again a joint effort between the St Pete Amateur Radio Club, the Clearwater Amateur Radio Society and the Upper Pinellas Amateur Radio Club. The 3 clubs get along well so it’s a good fit. We use the Clearwater Fire Training Center to setup at as we have the last 2…

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written by AA0O - Posted in Club, Contests

June 20, 2019

QSL Card from Dan K1TO

I’ve mentioned Dan K1TO a couple times, he’s probably the most famous ham I know. I worked him in the 6m contest a couple weekends ago and sent out for his card and quickly got a reply. He sent out a bunch of tips to the Florida Contest Group on how to work the contest and that got me interested in it. Dan has quite a list of accomplishments on his QSL card: CQ Hall of Fame WRTC co-champion 1996, 2000, 2002 Director of WRTC 2014 President of the Florida Contest Group till 2016, he’s also the organizer for the Florida QSO Party Dan’s card:

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written by AA0O - Posted in QSL

June 11, 2019

ARRL VHF Contest, 24 contacts, one was K1JT

Dan K1TO sent a post to the Florida Contest Group about how to do the ARRL VHF contest using 6m so I figured I’d try it. I mostly worked on my app and just flipped back to WSJT-X to check to see if there were any new callsigns available to work every once and awhile. Most were in Florida. Dan is about 30 miles away from my house and I watched him work a lot of stations that I couldn’t hear, but he definitely had some slow times as well. On 6m meters, sometimes there’s just nothing there, then it opens up and you can hear NY for 5 minutes….

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written by AA0O - Posted in Contests

June 8, 2019

Field day dry run

Today we had the field day dry run. We setup all the computers and made sure we had all the cabling we need. There’s a lot of cables to run 3 stations. We also have 1000ft of coax. At winter field day we had a bunch of 100ft coax all jumpered together and it was a chore to troubleshoot the issues. This should be easier. Field day is June 22nd-23rd. Signup here: https://www.sparc-club.org/

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written by AA0O - Posted in Club

June 3, 2019

Operating SS American Victory W4AVM for Museum Ships weekend

I saw a post from the SPARC club about the American Victory looking for operators for Museum Ships weekend and quickly volunteered for it. I’d been wanted to check out the station on board since I saw the presentation they gave at the club last year. Amanda and I went over Saturday morning and operated the station for a couple hours. We made 75 contacts together and had a good time touring the ship after. They invited us to join the W4AVM club and I think I’ll do it. The ship is functional and they take it out on a cruise twice a year and send radio messages for the…

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written by AA0O - Posted in Ships