Signs Of Life?

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. Good to see those two ancient rivals working together for my benefit!

I got a response from South Korea Sunday morning with a decent signal report, but we couldn’t complete the QSO so no dice there. I chased several Chinese stations during the week but had no luck. My GridTracker map will look really nice if I can add China.

My antenna project, which was just installing a bigger irrigation control box for where my feed line interacts with the lightning arrestor and then connects to our house, is complete. Naturally it took at least twice as long as planned and I managed to bungle it a bit.

Friday will be my first trip to Hamvention. Despite watching some YouTube videos of other ham convention events, I’m not sure I’m totally prepared for what I’m about to experience. I am not taking a shopping list, as I’ve done a pretty good job of stocking the shack since I began operating last fall. Never know what might catch my eye, though. Hoping for good weather in the hours I will be in Xenia on Friday.

  1. Read: I don’t want them making fun of me for talking to people on the radio. Need to get them into their summer plans so I can have some alone time during the day again. ↩︎