Oh my aching blood pressure!

***RANT ON***

I sat and listened to a DX station working split last night. Most of those calling listened to the instructions and were calling above the DX’s transmit frequency. I never DID hear the DX, myself. There were so many calling on his TX frequency, and of course, the self-appointed traffic cops sending “UP … UP” (without IDing, of course), that I couldn’t hear the DX. There can’t be THAT many clueless people out there, can there? Oops … silly question. Of course there are! Don’t people LISTEN anymore? Where’s my blood pressure medicine?

***RANT OFF***

73 de Dick N4BC

ARRL 10M Contest

Interesting propagation on 10 meters this weekend … Saturday morning the western USA was coming in here pretty well, then the midwest opened up. I’ve never heard so many MN and WI stations :-). Ten was definitely open to somewhere most of the day. Lots of CW stations today, but not many SSB heard. About 5pm, the band started dropping out … still a few stations heard, but only the big guns.

Well, we’ll see what tomorrow brings. I’ll give it a few more hours after lunch tomorrow and see what’s going on.

Additional comments – Sunday: early afternoon brought a couple of CW contacts. One was from the local area (Virginia Beach) with a fluttery signal, and the other was a BIG signal from Tennessee. Not anything heard on SSB and later, the CW signals just disappeared. Poof!

Additional Additional comments – I ended up with 41 QSOs for a total score of 2774. I’m satisfied with that. I didn’t really hit it hard … only sporadic operating on Saturday, and then today wasn’t very good.

73 de Dick N4BC

Pretty bad …

I managed to get on last night for a while after I got home from Choir practice … pretty bad. I made a couple of contacts, both in Oklahoma on 40m JT-9. I did start a QSO with a station in Arizona, but he disappeared on me about halfway through the exchange. Eighty meters had some CW action going on, but I didn’t hear much on digital. My noise level on 80 is pretty high … I really need to see where that’s coming from. Twenty meters was dead, except for a few weak CW stations.

This weekend is the ARRL Sweepstakes, but I don’t think I will have the time to invest. I have quite a few other irons in the fire that I can’t put off, so I think I’ll sit this one out. PLUS, I’m on call for work. NEXT weekend, though, I’ll be there for the CQ WW CW test.

73 de Dick N4BC

Some CW Action this evening

I’ve had some luck this evening working CW. There were some pretty strong signals coming out of the Caribbean and Central America … ZF2, HR9, PJ4 … etc. They were working pileups (mostly into Europe with some North Americans – me being one of those). All good operators, and just knocking them off, one after another. Not the most leisurely QSOs … more “Slam, Bam, Thank you Ma’am”. BUT … a contact in the log on an otherwise poor evening is a contact in the log!

Had a little lightning and thunder in the area this evening, too. I would think that as cool as it was today, that’s unusual.

Our repeater trustee wants me to give him some help setting up and interfacing our new Yaesu Fusion repeater with our RLC-2 Controller this weekend, so I guess I will give him a hand with that. We’re finally getting it installed SOON, I hope. Seems like it’s been forever since we lost our old tower site.

73 de Dick N4BC

Weekend Project

So … I’m almost ashamed to admit that I have had a BTech UV-5001 2m/70cm mobile rig sitting on the floor in my shack for a looooong time, instead of mounted in my truck where it could be put to use. Hey, I’m talking MONTHS here, folks.

MY WEEKEND PROJECT is to get it mounted and wired this weekend, so it’s not just used as a paperweight. I don’t know why there hasn’t been more of a priority for getting it done, except the fact that the repeater scene is pretty un-busy around here. It’s nice to have when you want or need it, though, so I’ll bite the bullet and “git-er-done”.

On another note, I was on 80 meters last night and made a few JT-65 and CW QSOs. They are out there, folks … you just have to chase them down and lasso them.

73 de Dick N4BC