When I installed the 30m I used the coax run into the house from my 2m antenna. I finally bought some more coax(Davis Bury-Flex, I find it easy to work with than LMR-400 and it’s about the same as far as losses) so I installed the last lightning arrestor I have room for. There’s been a crazy bird squawking in the yard all day and he kept divebombing me the whole time I was install the connector. Bird
Cards from Greenland and Namibia came today. I had heard XP3A from Greenland a few times before but wasn’t able to complete a QSO with him until recently. When I checked on getting his card I found he used a QSL manager and that guy also manages V51MA from Namibia so I got two cards for one postage. Now I just need XP3A to confirm on LOTW.
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…
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…
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:
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….
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/
Dave WS1ETI gave a good presentation on SETI. http://www.setileague.org/
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…
I found this contest to be a bit harder than it’s WW cousin. In this one you send a serial number, the other is just your CQ zone. I definitely improved me CW number recognition skills but 206 contacts over almost 15 hours isn’t a good score. I’ll get there eventually. I’m working on an iPhone app for morse code practice. More on that in a future post. Here’s a map of the contacts I made in this contest.
