I did a road trip to the northeast and stopped at Gettysburg on the way for an activation. I’d been to Gettysburg a few times with the Boy Scouts when I was a kid. I got there in the morning and there were very few people there, especially for the size and number of parking lots. I activated in one of the big parking lots after driving through. Only spent about 30 minutes activating and made 13 contacts.
This is a fun contest because the exchange is really easy. I ended up with 293 contacts. I tried to run for a bit but didn’t have much luck so it was all search and pounce. This contest has a big dupe penalty so that made me doublecheck a few times to make sure I had their call right before I sent my call which made the search and pounce a little slower towards the end. I had a good time with it. Hopefully next year we can run this one from the club station.
I received my CWOPs CWT Bronze Participation Medal. Even though it’s a participation medal it’s not easy to get. It is award for completing at least 10 contacts each in at least 60 weekly CWT morse code contests in the year. There’s 3 hour long sessions every Wednesday. I’m going for Gold this year, which is 120 sessions, I’m over halfway there already.
We had our 3-club joint field day this year at the Clearwater Fire Training Facility. We ran 3 stations plus a 6meter FT8 station. We setup 5 antennas including my hexbeam that I used to have on the roof of my old house. The hexbeam went together real easy and worked amazing. We have a triplexer so at one point we had all 3 stations using it on 10,15,20m. I got over 100 contacts on 10m CW which might be more than all my contacts on 10m ever. Here’s a great shot I got at sunset: After taking this photo I worked with Kenny K4OB on CW and we had…
Super casual effort on 6m FT8 for the ARRL June VHF Contest, made 27 contacts with quite a few being with people in the club.
I never had much interest in DMR but my friend sent me an Amazon link for a DMR radio for $20 so I couldn’t resist. It’s $40 now though, not sure it’s worth that much. The brand is “Cotre”, it’s chinese, there’s no manual and it doesn’t have a display. jhart99 has done a good job of documenting programming the radio on his website https://jhart99.com/co01d-programming/ You can program it with a Baofeng cable, as long as it doesn’t use the Prolific USB-to-Serial chipset(I had one cable with this chipset but luckily found another that worked with the CH340 chip) I couldn’t hit the local DMR repeater from my house so…
SX9V in Crete confirm our QSO from CQ WPX CW giving my 100th DXCC entity in LOTW, completing my 3 way digtial/voice/CW DXCC. Time to order the certificate.
Made a minor effort in the WPX contest this weekend. Worked a station in Crete, I’m hoping he reports to LOTW as I don’t have that one on CW and I’m at 99 for my DXCC.
Local Club, The Glorious Society of the Wormhole, held their annual hamfest this Saturday. It was very well attended. I ran a couple tables for SPARC and we made out pretty well. Also picked up an antenna for my handheld. This is the same location we do SPARCfest, we’ve already got the permit for November.
I’ve been kind of neglecting the POTA activations. Had my first business trip in 14 months so I stopped on the way back from Miami for an activation. This is nearby a couple other Wildlife Management Areas that I’ve already done. It was hot and muggy so I only made 14 CW contacts. My signal wasn’t great, mostly 559’s and a 229. I forgot my table so I had the key on the car bumper, I’m not used to CW in those conditions so my sending fell apart pretty quick and I called it after 30 minutes. I see they’ve added more parks in FL and one is in town…
