I did my weekly LOTW upload this morning and sent 71 entries over, my best effort in a couple months. Sadly each one was an FT8 contact. Between mediocre band conditions - does anything over 20 meters exist for phone at the moment? - and the college kids being home,1 there weren’t a ton of opportunities. There were two ATNOs in that upload, Turkey and Malawi. Turkey and Greece were both confirmed on LOTW, giving me 102 countries for the mixed award.
It was a better week, but still not back to where things were in early March. The local noise has been more sporadic, disappearing completely some days, raging on others. I guess that is progress. Band conditions have seemed poor more often than not. Or at least when I am able to attempt to get on air. It is frustrating to scroll through 10 meters and hear nothing, where just a few months ago right around lunch time it would be packed with European stations.
The local noise is back. Thankfully installing a choke at the radio has abated it somewhat, so I’ve been able to operate from home more this week than any time in the last month. No DX contacts on phone, and just few on FT8. At least I’m adding logbook entries. To balance that, I had my first successful POTA activation today. I’ll call it an unqualified success. My buddy K9MLP texted me this morning asking if I wanted to head to Ft.
A week with both good radio news, and aggravating radio news. With the opportunity to hit a state park on Friday, I took my POTA antenna out to a city park last Wednesday for a portable trial run. Bands seemed light but I quickly made two contacts, both to the south west of my location. Then things dried up. I could hear several stations on the east coast, but they couldn’t seem to hear me.
Occasionally I find a way to remind myself that I am not very smart. After several weeks of what I assumed were just terrible band conditions, I finally realized something else was causing my difficulties making contacts. While I’ve not fully identified the issue, I believe a local source is generating intense noise that has rendered the HF bands largely unusable for me. At first I wondered if my EFHW antenna had been damaged when the support cord failed.
It’s been the slowest radio week for me in months. A few days of storms kept the feed lines disconnected. We hosted family for Easter, meaning I had to pack away all my radio equipment much of the weekend so my office could be used as spillover for food and storage. And then the band conditions seem to really stink every day I try to get on the air. I thought I understood the relationship between propagation and the solar cycle from my SWL days.
An eventful week. We escaped the Midwest for a few days to enjoy some sun, heat, and sand. Naturally it was quite warm in Indianapolis a couple of the days we were gone, and in the 40s when we returned. Such is life in the Midwest in March… While we were away I at long last received a new callsign. For various reasons, I moved the call I applied for back in January down to the third spot on my latest application.
It is quiet in my shack. I had hoped to do some antenna repairs Sunday, but more high winds made that impossible. The wind storm continued into Monday and we’ve had off-and-on snow the last three days. Now kids are rolling in for their spring breaks and another relative will be staying with us briefly. My radio activities will be likely shut down for another week or so. That’s a shame because there is a new rig in the shack.
When you put up an antenna it is inevitable that there will be problems. Today, in the midst of hours of 60 MPH gusts, mine came crashing down. That’s a slight exaggeration. It is just a wire antenna, not a tower. The wire itself is fine. The paracord that ran into the tree the far end was anchored to failed. No wonder no one was calling me back on either phone or digital this afternoon.
The antenna feed line is disconnected as the final round of storms moves through our area today. Fortunately we just had lots of rain and wind and a little thunder. A couple limbs down in the yard, some mulch washed away by a downspout that is clogged, but nothing close to the damage done to our northwest last night. Because there is no connection to the antenna, I can’t take the new addition to my shack for a spin.
Another contest weekend in the books. I had to dodge thunderstorms Saturday morning, basketball Saturday afternoon, and some yard work Sunday. When I was in front of the rig, I rarely spent more than an hour at a time there, and I primarily chased the loudest signals. A hardcore contester I am not. Conditions seemed goodish Saturday? The best the bands have sounded in a few weeks to my ears. Maybe it was just that so many stations were on that made them seem that way.
I made contact with J51A on 15 today. Notable not just because it was an ATNO, but also because it had been exactly one month since my last ATNO on phone. A lot of that is due to my discovery of FT8. Band conditions have also stunk more often than not over the past 30 days. Bad enough that almost daily I peek out the window to make sure my antenna is still in the air and not lying on the ground.
Over the weekend I read that podcasts have surpassed AM/FM radio for how most Americans consume “spoken word” audio. Perfect jumping off point for a discussion of ham radio podcasts. Podcasts have been a huge part of my life since they first emerged onto the scene in the early-2000s. I remember reading an article in Macworld magazine in the spring of 2005 detailing how to record your own podcast. Within a few weeks I had slapped together a very rudimentary pod on which I shared my favorite new music with a select group of friends.
A strange couple of days on the bands. They’ve either been noisy or dead, at least at my QTH. I spun the dial this morning and other than POTA folks and AM rag chewers, it was hard to find any signals, quiet or loud. I monitor a couple daily nets, waiting to see if anyone checks in that I need before I check in. They seemed like the effort to make contact would be more than I was willing to put in.
Friday afternoon I tried to cut through the band noise and make a few contacts before it was time to make dinner. The results are in the image at the bottom of the post. (I’m either an idiot or micro.blog’s image embed feature is not working. If you could see the screenshot I tried to share, it would show eight straight contacts with Japan in a 15-minute run.) My first Indonesian station followed by a flood of Japanese.
I was officially voted into one of my local radio clubs last night. It seems like a good group, a mixture of folks both older and younger than me. Which I think is what you want in a club. I’ve always been a learn by reading and doing on my own person. It will be nice to have resources to actually talk to and watch as I prepare to jump into POTA, antenna design, and other areas where just watching a YouTube video might not cut it.
I’ve finally dipped my toes into the dark side of the hobby: FT8. Since I became active last fall I’ve not had any great interest in the digital modes. I want to “talk” to people, even if it is a simple exchange of 59’s and 73’s. That’s how I fell in love with radio, listening to signals that traveled hundreds or even thousands of miles to reach me. With digital, it all seems so disconnected.
An All Time New One for me today, T77LA in San Marino. He’s on a lot, so not the toughest of catches. But this was the first time I’ve caught him both when he was loud enough I could clearly hear him and there wasn’t a big pile up fighting for his attention. It is always fun to listen for a few minutes, make one call, and get picked up right away.
A few words about WWA, the contest that’s not a contest, but rather an award. I chased my share of WWA stations last month. Some days those seemed to be the only non-POTA stations to be found. It felt like I talked to Stuart in New Brunswick daily. That was the one bummer to me: I heard pretty much the same few stations every day. VE9WWA, N1W, CR6WWA, EG3WWA. I did squeeze in a couple new ones the final weekend, 4M5A and YU45MJA.
A few days of thinking about radio and doing some rearranging to my “shack.” Looking back at my dismissed vanity application, it appears that every call I had on my application expired during the government shutdown and received an extension before they officially become available. Each says Expired but remain unavailable on sites like AE7Q. Which explains why all the prediction sites had my first request in Green status. I guess.