Another very slow year for blog posts, I’ll try to do better in 2025. I did write two articles for the resurrected SPARC Gap club newsletter, we were finally able to get a volunteer and he eventually became the club secretary. I did complete one of last years goals and one from 2022, using the Hermes Lite 2 SDR to make a CW skimmer, which is also the topic of my first SPARC Gap article(pg 6). My 2nd article was on vanity callsigns(pg 4).
I attended Hamcation again in Orlando. I’m not sure I’m going to go this coming year, it’s literally exactly the same every year, same vendors in the same location, and I have very little on my list of ham radio things to buy. I do enjoy the speech at the contest dinner though. I ran the table at the SPARCFest, we had a few decent items and a couple not so great, which I enjoyed selling. I bought some transverters to do amateur satellites but found my rotator controller is broken, working on a replacement using my new 3D printer, but I bought in the antenna for the hurricane and haven’t put it back up yet. Also put together a really nice professional electronics workbench in my shack this year. Now for the stats:
1349 QSOs (20742 lifetime)
13,654 LoTW confirm QSOs
DXCC Mixed 205 (+9) broke 200!
DXCC 10m 86 (+19), 80m 67 (+4)
Band
Count
15m
457
20m
336
10m
256
40m
198
80m
48
17m
26
30m
13
12m
12
160m
2
60m
1
Mode
Count
CW
1088
RTTY
119
FT8
103
USB
39
Call sign
Count
TX5S
15
8P5A
9
PJ2T
9
CN3A
9
3G0YA
7
KP2M
7
N5RZ
7
TM7A
7
K3MM
7
TX7W
6
Goals:
Finish my GPS Clock v2 project
Finish the rotator controller and satellite antenna
Launch a Pico Balloon, I have most of the parts except the balloons. My friend Lisa had one launched in June and it was online thru November
