dick | N4BC

A Good Evening …

Forty meters was the workhorse this evening. I worked a bunch of digital contacts on forty, as well as a few on twenty and thirty. Then I went down to the CW portion and had a short (599 … TU) contact with both Montenegro and Kuwait. I tried for quite a while to break the pileup that Z66D (Kosovo) had going but unfortunately, no luck tonight! Ah well, there’s always tomorrow!

Weather’s been a bit wonky here as well. Eighty-some yesterday and mid-forties today. Please, Lord … SPRING!!!

73 de Dick N4BC

Good propagation tonight

Looks like pretty good propagation tonight. I worked a couple of hours of FT-8 on several bands (including sixty meters) and here’s where my signals were received:

I worked about 25 stations, running fifty watts to my vertical, mostly North America, so it was a nice evening. I was working stations while finishing up my tax returns (at the last minute, as usual).

73 de Dick N4BC

Another Digital Mode

I tuned across an Olivia QSO in progress last night on forty meters, and spent a while “reading the mail.” Just a couple of guys having a nice, pleasant, unhurried ragchew. The band was a bit unstable … up and down … but mostly strong signals. I must have monitored for almost twenty minutes or so.

When the band DID dip, though, it sometimes went so far down that the Olivia signal disappeared from the waterfall … not even a faint trace showed at times. But guess what? The letters on the display just kept on printing. Good solid copy even with no detectable signal on the waterfall. I was impressed. I’m gonna have to try this mode more often. It DOES seem to be gaining in popularity, and I’m all for trying new things.

73 de Dick N4BC

Unbelievable!

Ya know, I note that as of today, I have had over 33 thousand visits to this website since the start of the year, and that’s either scary or wonderful. I don’t know if they’re looking for something specific or if they’re randomly searching. That makes me humble and wanting to do better. Guess I’ll have to up my game.

73 de Dick N4BC

Club Stuff

Club meeting last night! After a dutch-treat dinner, where I had a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of Brunswick stew, we all met in the Community Room at police headquarters for our monthly meeting.

This was one of the better ones. We had a couple of prospective members attend (Bill and Phil) , and lots of interesting discussion about lots of different things.

Lots of discussion on our repeater woes. We’re still looking for a site since we lost our previous site, and several new leads were proposed. We also talked about this year’s upcoming Field Day, digital radio systems, public service, 60 meter operation, and several other subjects of interest. Lots of information shared made for a great, fun meeting.