re: Field Day 2023
The December issue of QST arrived a while ago and I invested maybe 15 minutes looking through the fine print for my score: 440 points. I think that my claimed bonus for Public Information Display was rejected; not unfairly mind you, it was a bit skimpy. Eh, surest way to fail is to not try, right? Maybe next year I will try harder, or maybe I will be somewhere remote (FD on Oak Island? lol) and not bother. We’ll see, right?
New radio, sort of …
Purchased online in a moment of madness, what can I say? Something to work on when I have finished all of the other ongoing projects.
The mini-est of all mics
I posted about this back on September 18th; last week I had a tube of clear RTV silicone working and I used the last tiny remnant to encapsulate this device.
Activating Wildcat Mountain last month
Besides hiking the Old Settlers Trail about every week lately, I did a quick activation in late November. Self-spotting worked well for me this time!
I also experimented with FT8 and the (tr)uSDX using the phone’s own audio in & out with the radio’s speaker and VOX, I think it seems to be working (as in, RF comes out of the radio when my phone makes digital-sounds, and the phone decodes received signals) but no actual contacts resulted; I quit when I realized that I had no idea what to do if I actually got a reply to my CQ! Maybe that would bring up a new window? What would getting a reply even look like? How would I try to call one of these stations I see calling CQ? The FT8CN documentation doesn’t cover any of these eventualities, I need to do more reading I guess; there seems to be a lot of stuff that is just taken-for-granted knowledge! The January QST that arrived today has a big FT8 on the cover; maybe there will be some beginner-level advice in there. (no, there wasn’t.)
Eleven months ago today …
I posted about my improvised HF antenna coming down out of the tree, and I still have no replacement up. Probably I am overthinking this; studying tables of non-resonant-on-any-band wires, trying to avoid power lines, you know the kind of thing. This time I want one that I can bring indoors to the radio room to make it a little easier to operate Straight Key Night. Probably I will use the same pine tree as the last one, though the hypothetical radiation direction is less-than-optimal.
Straight Key Night
is coming up soon! Pursuant to my resolution I need to get on the air for this one! Plenty of keys, plenty of radios, no antenna. I suppose I could do it portable if I had to, but the fact that it is winter keeps forcing itself into the forefront of my consciousness.
And coming up after that is Winter Field Day
27th – 28th of January in the New Year. More about this later, no doubt.
About that KH1
In view of the demand and resultant backlog, I am putting off the purchase until sometime next year. Watch this blog for the announcement!
Desultory planning for Oak Island 2024
is going on in the deep background. I am trying trying to extract all the lessons from the last trip, which might end up also producing another retrospective post about that trip.
More about these and other fascinating topics will be coming Real Soon Now!
This was just by way of catching up after a long period of thinking (at least once, just about every day) “gee, I should really do a blog post about (x) today”, then going on with whatever I was doing. Somehow the post never got written.
Thanks for visiting driftlessqrp!