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By w4kaz, created on 2011.05.31 at 18:16:14 | last changed on 2011.05.31 at 13:38:23 | Murphy.
I had saved Friday afternoon for some nice relaxing antenna maintenance time. It is time to replace the K9AY wires. Both loops have suffered a lot of damage from the odd falling branch, and the loops were made from fairly thin 18ga tinned automotive wire, I normally use for other reasons. Time to put up loops made of heavier gauge wire, because the RX antenna is a keeper. The 15m/10m loop also needs some work. It needs to be adjusted for better SWR if kept, but it will more likely be replaced with simple dipoles. Also need to check out some of the support lines, etc., etc. etc.
The wx did not cooperate with this plan. A big thunderstorm moved in, and there was a mini monsoon, the likes of which I’ve not seen very often here in NC. It was more like the spring storms more common on the gulf coast. “Torrential downpour”. “Monsoon”.
Anyway, with half of the XYL’s landscape floating away to the accompaniment of claps of thunder, the antenna plan hit the crapper. The occasional light shower continued through the afternoon, and the wx radar kept me from plugging into the antennas(aka “lightning attractors”) until about 0400Z. It would probably have been OK to operate sooner, but there was no reason to take the risk.
So, Friday resulted in a whopping 13Q’s of disinterested S&P.
Slept late Saturday(see where this is going?). Still not much interest. More half-hearted S&P on a mostly dead 20m band. A 10 minute 20m run produced zilch. Had more fun texting N4YDU than operating. In the early evening, 40m sounded good. Worked A73A, and hope he finally copied my number. He got the call on the first transmission, but needed fills on the number. But if they could hear me in Qatar, it must be worth giving running a shot. A forty minute 40m run produced about 50 Q’s, and some skimmer spot activity. Operated “assisted, low power” to test out the packet connections. Figured on a mostly S&P weekend, and figured it would be interesting to watch the band map. Somewhere in that time the N/S 40m dipole became disfunctional[after nabbing a lot of russians while S&P]. Bailed early again.
Sunday, more Q’s were made running than S&P. 20m was a lot more fun than on Saturday. 15m stunk using the 40m dipole, although it looks like it stunk for bigg gunz too.. The N/S 40m dipole showed intermittent, so I guess that huge branch that fell in February must have given it a good wack on the way down. Another repair project. Running stations was pretty easy on both 40m and 20m, so conditions on Sunday were much improved over those on Saturday.
The station was good to go inside the shack. With the skimmer spots being fed from the Reverse Beacon Net’s server, the band map was well populated. The filters established were adequate. The only part missing there were skimmer spots from a truly LOCAL skimmer. The SO2R arrangement was also good-to-go, although the lid operator was not motivated enough for “S&P2R”. If band conditions ever really break open again, with activity from 40m though 10m, the two radio capability is going to be more useful. However SO2R was mostly a learning project – figuring out how to accomplish it was the real goal. Time to revisit those filter projects again.
The Good:
- Nice to hear 20m sound better. Saturday was like sunspot minima. Sunday-much better.
- N/S 20m and E/W 20m dipoles produced good results in the expected directions, up to three S-units difference on weaker signals. Definitely worth having both
- Ditto 40m. Before it broke, the N/S 40m dipole was hearing many fine Russian ops much better than the E/W dipole, that is normally the first choice. The N/S works well into the GA/FL/Carribean/SA direction too.
- Packet set-up will work when it is wanted
- CW skimmer is every bit the game changer I expected.
- Pulled the 40m antenna switch box to debug for possible intermittent. Replaced broken connector on unused position, all seven positions on switch re-checked, switch good to go.
The Bad:
- CW skimmer is every bit the game changer I expected[depends on mood]
- didn’t get the repairs done
- bad attitude. Just not feeling the force
- No real game plan going into the contest
The Ugly:
- Washout on Friday afternoon.
- Broken antennas:Â K9AY, N/S 40m, 15m/10m loop
- New problem on 40m switch box
The final “Final”:
Call: W4KAZ Operator(s): W4KAZ Station: W4KAZ
Class: SO(A)AB LP QTH: NC
Operating Time (hrs): 12.5
Band QSOs
------------
160:
80: 10
40: 132
20: 208
15: 15
10: 1
------------
Total: 366 Prefixes = 260 Total Score = 215,540
By w4kaz, created on 2011.05.23 at 09:29:09 | last changed on 2011.06.03 at 11:15:42 | ***in progress, last update 2011/06/03, 09:00am local***
Just as soon as the pollen clears, it is time for another swat at Dayton Hamvention. Spending time at the house with the pressure washer is a lot less fun than going to Hamvention, but that’s the way it is again in 2011. [Those silly kids of mine BOTH want to go to college – cha-ching!]
No contest University – again. No FDIM visit. No chit-chat with the vendors. But it is possible to tour the 2011 Hamvention after the fact. On a vicarious 2011 Hamvention tour…………….
…and thanks to the astute reporting over at The Fi-Ni Report, we were certain Hamvention was still going to be taking place despite the onset of Zombie Armageddon. So if there HAD been any travel plans, there would have been no need to cancel them to instead hoard the shotgun shells needed for those hard to eradicate zombies that always pop up when the world ends.
New Stuff and various video:
NEW STUFF IS ALWAYS FUN- The Elecraft KX3 video tease! by the QRPARCI group. Actual KX3 data sheet.  Fun facts being teased out on the Elecraft mail list. Actual genuine Elecraft KX3 webpage.  O’course, the ubiquitous yahoo group for the kx3 is formed.
Another KX3 video by WB8CXO
Other takes and other New Stuff#1, LazydogSDR [new to me anyway]. This KE9V photo caught my eye…..A speaker/mike with a display. Really? LOL. Really? Thanks to Jeff for catching that one.
Video of ring-rotor that incorporates a motorized adaptation of a PVRC mount.
New Alinco DJ-G29T 220/900 Mhz HT Announced at Dayton 2011
Who shows up at Hamvention? ARRL video of chat by KF5BOC.
Contest University Webinars[warehoused by PVRC]:
K3LR’s vault of 2011 Antenna forum programs:
- #1 goes here
- #2 goes here
- #3 goes here
- #4 goes here
You never know what you will find in the flea market#1, fleamarket experience#2, fleamarket experience#3, fleamarket experience#4, fleamarket experience #5 [willing to wager this was NOT KF5BOC] {in hindsight, maybe useful around the sewerage spill}
RadioGuy was busy with the video camera: MFJ on the main floor, Yaesu, ICOM, Steppir, and more on RadioGuy76’s youtube channel.
Shaky Fleamarket tour part#1 and tour part#2 by KA1SUN
Video montage by TofuHasenpfeffer
Video Montage by joehusker.
Hamcity MONEYGRAB! video by ArkAngelz. Fun for kids of any age! Way cool.
VE7HHS video demo by Flex radio, VE7HHS finds what happened to the Geiger counters, and the inner workings of a Steppir.
And o’course, FD is not a contest. Although that’s a state of mind issue, aina?
The local “professional” coverage, and WHIOTV.
W5KUB Vendor Setup Tour [choppy stream??] .
Hamvention-too much fun to sleep! recap on Contest University, hara flyby, and “holy crap cow !” recaps by “sterwing’s”
Old School Morse – REALLY old school
What does one do at Dayton? a Hamtwits hamvention meetup.
There really is all sorts of “stuff” in the hamvention fleamarket! Yowza! O’course, you always need to watch your step in a fleamarket area anyway…..but….Yowza!
Bloggers Do Dayton:Â Missed a chance for a meetup with some of these folks.
- ARRL-May20, ARRL-May21, ARRL-May22
- K9ZW-1, K9ZW-2, K9ZW-3, K9ZW-4, K9ZW-5, K9ZW-6, K9ZW-Hamvention Revisited
- KE9V-1, KE9V-2, KE9V-3, KE9V-4, KE9V-5, KE9V-6
- First trip for KA3DRR, KA3DRR#2. Hope you had fun Scot!
- Also first trip for K2DSL, K2DSL-day1, K2DSL-Day2, K2DSL-Day3, K2DSL-Follow-up
- QRPer.com, QRPer#2.
- N3QO.
- K3TN.
- M1ACB’s vicarious hamvention, [a kindred spirit!]
- Even other NaySayers and ScoffVentions like me blog Hamvention…. K2DBK
- For all the other Naysayers who think one Dayton hamvention is just like any other, the 2010 hamvention links are still available too. O’course, why would a Hamvention Naysayer need the links anyway?
Some 2011 Hamvention photo albums, in no particular order:
Despite a larger number of Twits Tweeting the Hamvention in 2011, the ephemeral nature of the stream-of-consciousness twitter style is too much like mental cotton candy for my own tastes, and thus twittishness of all sorts shall hereby be firmly relegated to remain forevermore in the bit bucket. [Except maybe a few photos].
By w4kaz, created on 2011.05.06 at 17:53:56 | last changed on 2011.05.06 at 17:56:01 | A UK developer has hacked up a $25 computer. I hope its real. If it is, its quite an achievement.
Even if its $25EU……Whats that these days about $40USD?
By w4kaz, created on 2011.04.26 at 05:57:03 | last changed on 2011.04.25 at 15:01:47 |
By w4kaz, created on 2011.03.31 at 11:57:08 | last changed on 2011.03.31 at 15:52:47 | Wow.
This year was spent at N1LN operating under the NC Contesters Club Call NR3X. The three man team[N4YDU, N1LN, W4KAZ] was a group formed to put N1LN’s station on the air for the contest after failing to find the ops required to run the preferred M/2. I’m sure glad we didn’t let the opportunity slip by – lots of fun.
Propagation conditions were very good for this contest – the best I have caught in several years. Improved conditions and lots of active stations made the bands wall-to-wall donald duck essessbeee chaos. Very difficult to copy weak stations, but there were lots of LOUD signals too. Heard many layers of QSOs on the same frequency.
Lots of little fun facts trickled in during the course of the weekend. Made the mistake of trying to switch from 15m to 20m too early – and lost a high rate run. Lesson: Next time listen to N4YDU! Made the mistake of giving up too easily on “terrible” high QRM run frequencies. Lesson: Don’t move before the rate plummets! Beast it like N4YDU!
This contest, I made it a point to move the antennas around more often when the rates slowed and was rewarded with small boosts in the rate several times. Still not enough experience to know when to look for openings in directions other than EU, but sliding the beams 20 degrees either side of directly at Central EU usually found a few new ones hiding in the favored directions.
Getting the most out of N1LN’s station is something that is seeping in slowly. The options in a station designed for M/2 competition are quite a bit more complex than just putting the butt-in-chair. Also a world of difference between good yagi’s and dipole draped through the trees.
Looking at the raw score[3830 blurb] and the CQ WPX results database, we would have the fifth highest score ever posted for a Multi-One from the USA – based on scores through 2010. Unfortunately…. at least four other stations posted higher scores than our own for WPX SSB 2011, including what will be a new US record. So instead of making it into the top 10 all time scores, we might just wind up in the top 20. There are several score in the ballpark of our 11.7m, so it will depend a lot on how clean our log checks out to see where we land. There are going to be a LOT of great scores from this year’s contest.
We began the contest with general goals of 3000 to 3500 Q’s and at least 1000 mults. We thought the improving conditions would help, and thought the mults would be the more difficult goal to reach. Recent rule changes to Multi-Single for WX allow for 10 “band changes” per clock hour with one transmitted signal on the air rather than a mult radio. This allows only 5 mults on different bands, assuming the run station remains on a single band for the duration of a clock hour. That made for a lot of difficulty working mults on the second radio without disrupting the run station and losing a run frequency. So the final result is a really good showing, and very happy with the mult totals.
A lot of the mults, as well as a lot of widespread DX called into our runs. At the N1LN station, I tend to get caught off guard by the variety. While running I logged B7, HS, several ZL and VK stations, all with the antennas pointed in directions not favorable for those directions. It is really fun operating at N1LN.
Like always, an hour after my last shift my thought run towards “Why did we do this?”. The next morning, after a solid night’s sleep the question morphs into “It really wasn’t THAT bad, was it?”. Less than a week later, the question again morphs, becoming “When can we do that again?!?!”.
The Band conditions were a whole new can of worms compared to recent years. It is time to re-make the “rule book” to be dynamic enough to fit the changing conditions. What worked as band strategies for periods of crappy propagation do not apply to periods of good propagation. Go where the rate is – but where the heck is that gonna be?
160m – no activity, high storm noise.
80m. There was a moderately high noise level on 80m, but the nice beverages at N1LN’s station compensated. During the night shift 40m dropped off due to the heavy QRM, and lack of EU calls while trying to listen split. Better to work 1 pointers than nothing, so down to 80m we go. 80m was crowded, but not nearly the QRM levels of 20m and 15m. Decent rates running strings of US stations with a nice mix of North and Central Europe stations calling every 4th or 5th Q. With the beverage pointing at EU, the 6 and 7 land US stations were hard to copy, so the beverage controls got a decent workout switching from W to NE. That run held up through the whole shift.
40m. Just not any fun operating 40m on SSB. Split didn’t pan out. Ugh.
20m was good – if you consider slam packed high QRM condx good. Even with the QRM, there were bright spots when strings of strong stations would call in. Mostly 20m was neglected in favor of the 15m bonanza. It sure seemed like rates were low because of the good 15m conditions.
15m was wide open on Sunday. After Saturday, we were thinking we were heavy on 15m, and might need to press 20m harder to keep the rate up, but N4YDU was being called by multiple stations. Asking for fills was common due to crowded band conditions. But it was great to hear 15m hopping again. Probably the best 15m conditions I’ve operated, and certainly the best I’ve seen yet from a top-notch station.
10m – Finally! Friday evening started with a 10m opening to ZL/VK territory, which may have been lost opportunities. Not much activity on 10 on Saturday. Sunday afternoon the bubble burst on 10m. With the antennas pointed south N1LN and YDU were able to run stations for a short period, and we were getting hits from all directions. One of the better gems was a call from a station in Malta. YDU indicated it was probably a Caribbean skewed skip opening, but it was sustained for the better part of an hour and accounted for the bulk of the 10m Q’s logged.
The Good: The generosity of N1LN and N1YXU in hosting the operations is deeply appreciated. Great working with N1LN and N4YDU.
The Bad: Too easy to bail on high QRM run frequencies. The joke was that was the GOOD run frequency.
The fUgly: Murphy was off visiting others. Maybe he was happy with having smoked the home QTH microwave on Thursday. [Blown microwave oven magnetrons smell just like blown power supplies.]
Raw Score [3830 blurb]:
Call: NR3X **** Operator(s): N4YDU, W4KAZ, N1LN **** Station: N1LN
Class: M/S HP **** QTH: NC **** Operating Time (hrs): 48
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
160: 1
80: 334
40: 695
20: 1013
15: 1203
10: 234
------------
Total: 3480 Prefixes = 1267 Total Score = 11,738,755
**
By w4kaz, created on 2011.02.20 at 18:05:28 | last changed on 2011.02.20 at 20:33:30 | “E’ Says E’s not dead yet!”
Some life in 10m. Not fabulous for the peanut whistle, but a lot better than recent times.
20m was really pretty good compared to recent excursions into the ether. At least for the short times operated. It was pretty cool to hop on 20m, call CQ, and have a 150Q 10 minute rate. The rate didn’t last for more than 15 minutes, but it was great to have a whack at what can happen when conditions improve. Too bad it doesn’t happen more often.
10m and 15m had signals, but not a lot of mixed success trying to work them. For a change, 20m was easier. The 10m/15m antenna situation may change. It looks like there may be room to pull a dual band dipole up in the current home of he 10m/15m loop. That should play better since the effective height of the antenna will be significantly higher.
Tried a short run on 40m around 2030Z, which would normally be a bit on the early side for the peanut whistle to work EU on 40m. Yet I had a nice run of EU stations there, and signal strengths were generally good for that early. Had to ask for a lot of fills, the QSB was troublesome and I had difficulty pulling calls out of the mini-pileups.  A better op would have been nailing them more easily.
The propagation within the US seemed to be pretty good on all bands. This sort of improvement will be very welcome for WPX and for FD and IOTA if it continues through the summer.
Class: SOAB LP; QTH: NC; Operating Time (hrs): 6.5
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160:
80:
40: 80 30
20: 125 38
15: 19 14
10: 9 9
-------------------
Total: 233 91 Total Score = 63,609
-
By w4kaz, created on 2011.02.14 at 12:01:37 | last changed on 2011.10.20 at 08:49:15 | I see the solar flux ended the day Sunday over 100 for the first time since 2005.
Yet Sunday afternoon, 10m was still just as dead as a doorknob. Spent a few minutes several times hunting beacons, but only the local one here in FM05 was audible. Didn’t hear much on 15m either, but there were a few CW Q’s and some RTTY signals. One very faint SSB QSO.
Perhaps a few days of flux will help improve conditions. What with ARRL DX CW coming, that would be a welcome change.
But the whole extended propagation drought has me re-evaluating the 160m antenna versus the 10m/15m antenna. Its not necessarily an either/or, but the supports they occupy could probably be used for other things. Its probably a good time to re-evaluate the available support/actual usage trade-offs again. Most of the wires were hoisted based on what supports were unoccupied, rather than as a whole station best use plan. [ Plan? Plan?]
There’s a three week window here where the temperatures will be moderate and the leaves are not yet budding. Plan? None yet occurs.
The 10/15m loop is probably in a spot that might be better used for the 160m vertical. The 160m vertical is a bit on the long side, and the darn thing is working – kinda-sorta hate to “fix” something that works. But there’s also K2AV’s new idea for the radial/counterpoise to consider. Not sure what the real fun factor is in the situation. In the end, the real plan is to maximize the fun.
So, where’s the long-term fun gonna be? 40m and 80m? Never much cared for 20m……although it has its moments.
For the current moment, procrastination may cause the ideal antenna work window to come and go. The squirrels in the biological antenna support structures may get to enjoy spring unmolested.
By w4kaz, created on 2011.01.24 at 05:47:10 | last changed on 2011.01.23 at 14:47:27 | Blew off most of the recent fun contests. Just a few QSO’s in Stew Perry, fewer in NAQP CW, and zero interest in NAQP SSB. Atypical, but there it is.
During Stew Perry I operated long enough to observe the K9AY was having a good night. RX on the K9AY was much better than on the transmit antenna in a lot of cases, even though QRN was relatively low. I was able to copy several stations on the K9Ay that were below the noise on the TX inv-L antenna. The wx conditions had been very wet leading into that weekend, so I expect the ground conditions were better. The radial field for the K9AY got torn up during this seasons leaf harvest, so its mostly just a ground rod. That’s worth investigating more thoroughly and methodically.
Currently the normal shack-time has been squandered toying with the Linux file server. Been toying with some PHP/html curiosities, and getting a project gathering band data from the ARRL Sweep contest migrated to the server. Most recently been more compelled by curiosity into looking at the raw data now available from the reverse beacon network. The “reverse beacons network” is simply a site that has been set up[by PY1NB, F5VIH, and N4ZR, et. al.] to gather spots generated by various CW skimmers that have public access nodes.
Currently the network is fairly irregular, in that most of the skimmers seem to be part-time. But there are more of them active for more regular durations as time and interest marches forward. Interesting idea. The data available goes back to 2009, by the day. It occurs to me that the data might be useful as yardstick for measuring a station’s relative strength. A good way to compare stations in the only way that really counts – how well can they hear you.
The amount of data available is fairly large, even with a relatively small and irregular network of skimmers being aggregated. It seems like it might be interesting to peel off the data I feel is of interest, and see if anything interesting can be “squouze” from it. To that end, a whole new array of “how do I get ????” questions pop up. The spot analysis tool written by F5VIH is a great start, but maybe not exactly what I’d like to see. In the end, nothing may come of the recent curiosities other than a less than rigorous exercise of the gray matter.
Let the leaves blow where the wind takes them.
By w4kaz, created on 2010.12.29 at 17:22:13 | last changed on 2011.01.06 at 13:23:42 | Given the plethora of P4 boxes showing up in recycle bins as companies migrate off of WinXP, a recent reclamation opportunity made it seem like a good time to save some landfill space and cobble together a Linux file server. So with a scrap Dell GX280 in hand, the file server/testbed project saw some attention. Stuffing an extra couple of memory sticks into the obsolescent GX280 brought it up to 2GB. The GX280 should be a very usable Ubuntu or WinXP platform with 2gb, so its a great shack backup too. The limitation was the hard drive. A spare 80gb drive is set up with WinXP, and an el-cheapo 500gb drive went in for the Ubuntu install. Not phenomenal, but not bad for under $75USD. Hell, it would have been useful without the upgrades.
The Dell GX280 seems to be well supported by Ubuntu – all of the peripherals are up and running after the install, no hardware/driver hacking required. Installed Ubuntu 10.04(lts). The GX280 is widely available as scrap. Kind of like throwing away a good pre-1974VW Beetle was back in the 1980’s. Not too sexy, but still serviceable enough for generic mundane uses. Wish I had grabbed more of them[VW’s and GX280’s]. [Aside: Both my 1968 Beetle and my wife’s 1984 Honda Civic hatchback got better mileage(48mpg and 42mpg respectively) than today’s EcoWeenie “hybrids” get in real life usage. Ain’t “progress” something to behold?]
Networking the boxes turned out to be the biggest roadblock, and it is still an incompletely resolved situation. That’s not related directly to the hardware, but to the mix-match of OS’s in the network. The home experimentation network consists of Win7, WinXP, and Ubuntu 10.04 boxes. All of the boxes can see the others. The symbolic names are mostly useless, as only the XP and win7 boxes can access each other using the symbolic names[sometimes]. The linux boxes can share files, but only by using their IP addresses, even with the XP boxes. Obviously user error setting up Samba shares. Not a major issue when the router assigns the internal IP’s, providing an alternate route, but far from perfect. Windows 7 isn’t playing nice with any of the others, probably related to the user security.
So for the present, IP address’ are the ticket. Kludgy at best, but mapping the drives by IP address works across the platforms. Not really any more difficult to use the IP’s. Since they are mapped at the router, its probably easier to remember the box numbers anyway.  “x.x.x.157 is what????”
The good news is that setting up SSH on the Ubuntu platforms was simple enough that even a linux noob can figure it out.  SSH security tips are widely available. With an X-window client and PuTTY installed on the windows side, any of the windows boxes can be used as remote desktops for the linux machines. That more or less eliminates the need for monitor/keyboards or the use of a KVM with the X boxes. Nice to have, but not required. So the file server can be stuffed into some nook or cranny down in the dungeon/KazShack. So far I’ve set up only two boxes as control consoles, one an Ubuntu desktop(using SSH), and the other the Win7 box I use most often(using PuTTY and an X-server).
Having the Win7 box able to remote into the server gives the best of both worlds. I can now tinker with the programming stuff on the Linux side directly from the windows desktop. Geek Heaven. Since ARRL finally added the CSV option back to the contest results, I can continue collecting the band breakdown data for the Sweepstakes contests.
The next area of experimentation is to try out some VM’s. I’m curious as to how much access a contest logging program might have to the required hardware interfaces[USB, serial, LPT] when it sits in a winXP VM being run on top of linux. Since linux has good control of those hardware interfaces, in theory it should be possible. Don’t know if the VM’s available are yet up to the task, but loggers are not really doing anything too exotic. Might be possible, and it seems like a better overall approach than using WINE if the hardware has the extra horsepower needed.
Given the dearth of Linux contest specific loggers, it might be the most practical approach. Since the major contest loggers are written in Visual Basic, it may be the only way to run those particular apps under Unix.
Or maybe not….
Useful Stuff:
Updated, 2011/1/6: The Notepad++ portable app seems to work perfectly well using WINE in Ubuntu 10.04. Notepad++ has a easy end-of-line conversion for text files, making it easy to switch from CRLF to LF, or vise versa.
By w4kaz, created on 2010.12.05 at 16:08:22 | last changed on 2010.12.05 at 16:11:57 | That was fun. Got a chance to really test drive the 160m inverted-L with the new series capacitance matching installed. The capacitor switching is not yet wired, but the match is best at about 1845. The KAT100 tuner for the K2 is easily able to match the antenna across the CW areas. Without the switching in place, the area above 1900 is not usable, but that’s not a problem for ARRL 160m.
Operating low power into a vertical is a challenge on any band but has always seemed a larger hurdle on 160m. It seems like the Inverted-L is playing very well – certainly better than before the matching at the antenna feed point was improved. There were a few stations that struggled to hear the peeps from the KazShack, but the percentage of good QSO’s versus “no cpy pse ltr” definitely seems to have improved.
Operating was limited mostly to early evening. Not a lot of DX worked, just a couple of Caribbean stations and an F2 that must have really good ears. The Caribbean stations were booming, so they probably had less trouble copying the 100w. Didn’t hang in the shack until the EU sunrise, but the F2 was early.
Darting in and out of the KazShack Saturday afternoon, low-and-behold, those three or four intrepid operators cq’ing into the teeth of a mostly dead daytime 160m band have pretty darn good signals. Short distance regional Q’s, but with low noise conditions a few hundred more stations on the air would make the afternoon on 160m interesting. Very easy copy.
The Good:
- Got a light dusting of snow Saturday afternoon while helping the XYL with trimming the Christmas tree. Nice afternoon!
- Worked most of the S&P contacts on the first call. A few required hearing the call more than once. A handful were still deaf to my every attempt.
- Two really nice runs where the 15 minute rates hit 120/hr. Must have been spotted. The first was Friday evening. The second was around 6:00am local Saturday morning.
- Gotta love the wintertime. Conditions very quiet on Saturday evening after about 7:00pm local. Listened mostly on the xmit antenna Saturday. Good conditions at other times too. Used the K9AY rx antenna for some of the tougher Q’s.
- Great booming signals from the couple of Caribbean stations.
- E77, HI, were good easy copy but didn’t fight their pileups. Worked F2. Probably would have had better luck picking up a few new countries if the butt had stayed in chair.
The Bad:
- Would like for folks to allow the DX stations the chance to call CQ in the DX window. It’s not really that difficult to find a run frequency on 160m outside the DX window.   Maybe SantaClawz, the TeethFerry, and the EasterWabbit can hold a bi-partisan beer summit,have a group hug, sing Kumbaya, and a collegial atmosphere of good will and peace on earth will break out. Even then it probably won’t trickle down to the amateur radio community.
- Not enough rest going into the weekend – no operating after midnight local. Only about 9 hours total Butt-In-Chair time.
The Ugly:
- None! Murphy was busy elsewhere.
The Outcome:
Station: W4KAZ
Class: Single Op LP
QTH: NC
Operating Time (hrs): 9
Summary:
Total: QSOs = 329 Sections = 51 Countries = 5 Total Score = 37,856
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