January 28, 2020

Winter Field Day 2020

Once again we had Winter Field Day at the Clearwater Fire Training Facility. It’s a great location and they give us the run of the training areas. We setup a beam, a rotating dipole, 2 slopers and an off center fed dipole. We ended up with over 1200 contacts and covered every US section. It was a really nice day but rather cold once it got dark. I worked almost exclusively on the CW station and found I was able to keep up with the slow field day sending speeds. I think it was a success and everyone had a good time.

January 12, 2020

NAQP CW January 2020 – 79 contacts

I’ve started the CW Academy intermediate class and my advisors have asked us to set weekly goals and then report on them. For my first week I set a goal of 50 QSO’s in the NAQP CW contest. I was able to get 79 QSOs. I found that I’m getting pretty good at copying callsigns, even the fast ones. I’m not too bad with states but I’m not good at all at copying names. Names like Al, Ed, Tom or Bob are pretty easy but ones like Bryant, Niz or Tree threw me off a lot. It was a fun way to practice my CW. I sent my name as…