QRP in the Driftless
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First hamfest of the year
It was scheduled to be in the Legion hall in Onalaska (suburb of LaCrosse), but due to inadvertent double booking it was moved to the Legion hall in Sparta at the last minute. The reason I know this is the club secretary, who was in the parking lot in Onalaska to redirect strays (such as…
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a Western Electric 6B key question
If you know the answer, please tell me in the comments. Thanks for visiting driftlessqrp!
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Spring(ish) at Buckhorn State Park
I don’t suppose that it’s surprising that Wisconsin should have a couple of weeks of deep-freeze weather in the middle of February; just inconvenient. Yesterday was warmish, the forecast predicted more and better for today; it might be Radio Weather! A few minutes before 7 I was at the local Kwik Trip filling up multiple…
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A bunch of unrelated stuff
I finally finished my WFD log I use an open-source program called Xlog (the only one I can get to work right with my various Linux Mint computers) to produce electronic logs from my pencil-and-paper ones; it makes a very nice ADIF file that Parks On The Air accepts with no problems, but when I…
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Winter Field Day, 2025
– a retrospective When I was mostly awake in the dark on Saturday morning, I felt for my watch and found the lower-left button and pressed it once, to shift from local time to what I still often think of as Greenwich Mean Time. Next, the upper-right button to illuminate the face. Eleven-hundred something. Five…
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Ice Cave – status report
After a hike on a new (to me) trail, a return to an old favorite! The Ice Cave trail is a short and enjoyable hike all-year-round, but its special time is winter, when there may be an actual Ice Cave. I must have driven past it 7 or 8 times in the last few months,…
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A new hike
I’ve had my eye on Lost Creek County Park for a while now, but never hiked any of the trails there until today. We got a little coating of freezing rain overnight, so I waited until midday when the temperature got up to around 35 degrees; mild weather for February! Groundhog Day! Punxsutawney Phil saw…
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Winter Field Day is coming
… not this weekend, not the next one, the one after that … January 25th and 26th. 1600 UTC to 21:59 UTC the next day. I imagine I’ll do as before; treat it as an exercise: just throw my packs (as they stand) into the car. Set up at Wildcat Mountain State Park? Over half…
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Last and first hikes
Last hike of 2024 was just after dawn on the 30th, on the Camel Bluff Trail at Mill Bluff State Park. It was a cool and foggy morning, no breeze to speak of, and about 28 degrees. There was snow and ice on the trail in some places, but mostly it was easy to just…
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Buckhorn State Park, US-1443
Lat week I found a window of time to go play radio! The night before, I spent some time looking at the POTA map and tentatively decided on going to Buckhorn S. P., one that I never activated before, though it is not far away. The day dawned chilly (in the ‘teens), breezy, and sort…
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Saved by the “octopus”
The big surprise on a a recent activation was the missing power cable for the X6100. No worries, there in the tangle of assorted cables was the “octopus” I made last year; a power connector for every field radio to a pair of powerpoles. After returning home I found the missing cable on my bench,…
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A wintry activation of US-1480
It was overcast, seventeen degrees, and flurrying gently when I rolled out of the driveway en-route to Wildcat Mountain State Park, and the sun was about to get above the horizon as I was driving along the county highway. As I promptly realized when I got to the park it was just too cold for…
A backwater of the Mississippi River in the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge on a gloomy, chilly day in early November, viewed from the Lower Diversion Dike Trail.
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