An October retrospective, and a November omnibus

Soup weather

It drizzled all morning, but as the temperature dropped it has turned into snow. Big, healthy flakes, coming down ever heavier. My most urgent project at the moment is outdoors, so it’s a chance to catch up with the blog, while enjoying a bowl of sausage-and-lentil soup. Lots of little items, in no order:

(tr)uSDX

The little orange box with the outboard speaker has become my shack radio, on a corner of one table in the radio room. For an antenna I am using the random wire in the tree with the ATU 10, and I have the QRPguys power meter / dummy load handy to safeguard the BS170 finals when testing. Power comes from an MFJ 4245 whose ammeter doesn’t even notice that the radio is connected.

I am slowly accustoming myself to the controls of the radio; mostly I am just listening to the low end of 20 meters.

A variation on the ATU-100 design for QRP power levels.

Perennial Kale

Back in April, it appeared that two kale plants from the previous year had survived the winter and were putting out new growth!

These two healthy (and edible) shrubberies are the result!

I’m going to cut back the lower leaves again, and we’ll see what happens!

Other garden notes:

The garlic is all planted, under a layer of hay.

We are still harvesting a few hardy greens and some fingertip-sized heads of broccoli, but the hard freezes of the last few days may have kiboshed them at last.

Millen 90651

What the heck is that?

Bought this at Sandwich hamfest back in May.

This is still a useful instrument for finding the resonant frequency of a circuit.

The first combination was out-of-range … too much L and too much C!

For lots more about all the things you can do with a Millen 90651 Grid-dip oscillator, here is the manual: courtesy of the Boat Anchor Manual Archive.

Lots of hiking, not much radio

There are portable operators who can do a whole POTA activation in under an hour, and someday I hope to be that good; these days it still seems to take me 2 or 3 hours to get enough in the logbook. What that means in practice is that I sometimes get to a park and then feel like I won’t have enough time!

Usually when that happens there is enough time to take a good hike, and that is what I do. Mill Bluff / Camel Bluff, Wildcat Mountain, 400 State Trail, Mirror Lake …

There are lots of little county parks and trails, too; there’s lovely hiking all over the Driftless Area, but of course those are not POTA entities. Some of them are conveniently close, which is handy when time is really short.

Oak Island

in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, was closed all year because of Too Many Bears. Maybe next year!

It’s orange hat season again

just like last weekend.

Activated US-1480 today!

I’m going to wrap this post up and start a new one.

Thanks for visiting driftlessqrp!