Stopped on my way back from a trip to Jax. Really nice brick road into the forest and the dirt road were in great shape. Unfortunately it started raining about 10 minutes after I got setup so I cut it short with only 12 contacts.
Stopped for some POTA today. Had a good pileup going on CW and someone kept sending “ID” and I was like why does this guy want me to treat Idaho special. Then I thought maybe that was part of his callsign so I sent it back to him. Then I finally realized I hadn’t sent my call in awhile so I sent it. Need to remember to do it more in CW, I do it by habit in SSB. I was losing my CW focus so I switched to SSB and had a good run but then it started to rain and I wasn’t under cover so I packed it…
First time getting an eyeball QSL card in the mail. This from the MVARA bus I checked out in Dayton this year.
Went to the 2nd Annual Manatee Amateur Radio Club MARCIfest in Bradenton over the weekend. This was a small hamfest with a few vendors. I saw a few SPARC members there. Pretty easy to get to just south on the highway about 20 mins.
Received the certificate for making contacts from the American Victory Ship in Tampa Bay, W4AVM back in June. Forgot to post photos when I went there. Here’s some:
SPARC members took a field trip down to the WRMI commercial station near Okeechobee in Florida. This station runs 15 transmitters at 100k watts each for 1.5 million watts of RF power!
Put in a minimal effort in the NAQP CW contest. Got two contact on 10m from Hawaii though which is a new one for me I believe. My ADIF mapper is broken so I used a different one:
Saw that there was a Feld Hell sprint contest this weekend and I never worked that mode before so I tried it out. It sends a fax style signal with the font embedded in the waveform. I only made one contact and it was a little cumbersome as I’m not familiar with the QSO flow exactly. I feel like it could be a fun contesting mode if I can get the UI sorted out. Here’s what it looks like:
Had a slow start but then things started to pick up in the afternoon. Ended up with 332 CW contacts from S&P. 15m worked well for a lot of the time. This is one of my favorite ones due to the easy exchange of the ITU zone. There’s only a couple tricky ones, US and Brazil are commonly heard callsigns that have more than one zone possibility. Even got a contact with Kazakhstan.
This year we hosted the summer Field Day at the SPARC club station. After a discussion with the members we decide to be a “D” Class station rather than “A” to make it easier since it was the first time we’ve done it as a single club in awhile. “A” stations use generator power and temporary antennas. We just got the permanent tower in working order so we wanted to test it out. We did setup a temporary Zero-Five antenna like the one I have at my house. Saturday was really slow, we had around 350 contacts, but things really picked up Sunday morning and we ended the weekend with…
