AmateurRadio.com

About a week ago, I received this e-mail in my G-mail account from Scott N0HOT. I don't check my G-mail account on a daily basis, so I didn't discover this until yesterday:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByXPhBf853_qaDVTemNEVklzVkttODFaRlJfSGdVcGpWQV9R/view?usp=sharing

As a Morse Code fan, I thought this was pretty nifty! I don't plug may people's products on this blog, but I thought this was neat enough to warrant an exception.  I guess I'm like Dan KB6NU, in that I consider myself a CW Geek. And for 99 cents, it's not like it's going to break the bank or anything - right?

So I think I'm going to pop on in to the iTunes store (if I can ever remember what the heck my Apple password is) and will purchase this little app.

Well played, Scott. Well played, indeed.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!

I spent a few hours, yesterday and today, playing in the Texas QSO Party. As annual QSO Parties go, this one must be one of the best.

With Texas being such a large state, there seemed to be a correspondingly large amount of activity. As well, Texas is a nice single-hop from here on HF and most signals, even from the numerous mobiles, were loud.

I entered in the low-power, single- operator, CW-only class and without spending huge amounts of time, ended up with 185 contacts in 117 counties. There was a very active fleet of mobile operators as well, moving from county to county and sometimes setting-up on county borderlines to provide two, three or even four counties at a time. Thanks to the dedicated mobilers ... you fellows really add a lot of interest to the contest.

Mobile stations also provide extra 'bonus' points, with 500 additional points gained each time you work the same mobile in 5 different counties. Two of them were worked in more than 15 counties, while five were worked in 10 counties. Two were worked in 9 counties, missing the extra thousand points by one more from each.

My weekly QSO Part activity has been a good way for me to ease back into contesting and an aid in improving my ear-brain-keyboarding skills ... it's been helping a lot. One area that doesn't get a lot of practice is in the 'run' mode, since most of these QSO party contacts are in the 'search and pounce' (S&P) mode. Hopefully something will come up soon where I can get more 'run' practice as this requires a higher level of alertness compared with S&P. In reality, either mode is a great way to keep your CW skills honed.

The old laptop, running Windows XP, continues to work well as does the N1MM logging software driven by the K1EL USB keying interface. Further scrubbing of the laptop's unneeded files and start-up programs has sped boot-time to about 90 seconds. Quite an improvement over the eight minutes it was taking before tackling the cleanup!

If you are interested in getting started in contest work, or getting back into it, the WA7BNM Contest Calendar is probably the best source of information ... descriptions of all of the major contests (and some not so major), as well as links to contest-sponsor pages, may be found there. As well, the same site provides the '3830' board, a place where contesters can share their claimed score totals and discuss the event immediately following a contest. It's always fun to see how you compare with other submissions in the same category.

I spent a couple of hours again this weekend playing with the N1MM contest logging software and getting back into the contesting groove. My new K1EL USB interface continues to work flawlessly, even on my ancient XP laptop ... gone are the occasional keying stutters produced when previously keying from the serial port. N1MM is one of the most widely-used contest loggers and is freely available for download here. I still run the older 'Classic' version as I don't think my laptop could handle the newer 'N1MM +' edition ... I'll upgrade when I get a newer contesting laptop.

Both the Colorado and the Tennessee State QSO Parties were held this weekend, providing me another round of CW contest practice. Both activities are pretty low-key affairs when it comes to contesting but hey, every bit of practice helps.

I found surprisingly little action in the CO Party, making just 18 contacts ... 12 on 20m CW and 6 on 40m, with 17 sections worked. There seemed to be more activity from TN amateurs though, with 38 QSO's in 33 sections, 28 on 20m and 10 on 40m. All contacts were made on CW. All of the 40m contacts were made several hours before local sunset here, surprising the heck out of me that the W4's could even hear me in broad daylight ... the stations worked must have very quiet locations.

The state QSO parties are a good way to enjoy a short round of contesting without blowing an entire weekend, which I don't think I would really like to endure, and there seems to be at least one or two of them each weekend ... an easy way to ease into contesting or to keep up your on-the-fly contest keyboarding skills.

Yesterday's mail brought an official - looking envelope from the U.S. Army! It contained a very nice letter from Fort Huachuca, Arizona, thanking me for participating in the '66th Military-Amateur Crossband Test' as well as three QSL's for the Army-affiliated contacts that I had made back in May.


During the activity, I was able to work Army stations AAZ (AZ), WAR (Pentagon), WUG-2 (TN) ... all on 20m via the crossband mode as the military stations transmitted outside of the band.





In addition to these three, two Navy stations were worked ... NWVC (IN) and NPD (TN) but it appears that 'Army' has beaten 'Navy' ... at least when it comes to QSL'ing!

I was doing a little housekeeping in the shack this past week and ran across small piece of  anti-static foam with a transistor sticking out of it. It was the transistor from my Tuna Tin II final amplifier's stage ... the actual transistor that I had used to 'Work All States' on 7040KHz using my Tuna Tin back in 2000. Looking at it in my hand brought back a lot of wonderful memories from the fall of that year when I spent so much of my time looking for new states.

Like many others at the time, I was swept up in the second 'Tuna Tin revolution' when the NorCal QRP Club released a very inexpensive kit for the Tuna Tin II. It turned out to be the best $13 I had ever spent on ham radio bits as it brought me so much operating fun while making many new acquaintances in the process.


I recall the afternoon that I completed the kit ... attaching my antenna and calling 'CQ' on 7040 with a hand key plugged into the Tin. My afternoon call brought an immediate response from a station in Oregon who gave me a 579 report! Needless to say I was elated that it's ~360mw had done so well.

Over the next few days I worked a few more stations in the western states even stretching out to northern California and had pretty much decided that most of my QSO's with it would be fairly short range ... until the pre-dawn hours of August 6th when my hand-keyed 'CQ' was answered by NØTU (Steve), in Colorado! We had a nice solid ragchew until we ran out of darkness but the contact had given me re-newed optimism. If I could get a decent signal into Colorado, then perhaps I could actually work further afield ... maybe it was even possible to work all 50 states!

With that, I set myself a goal of trying to work them all. Although my 40m half-sloper was well matched and had proven to be a good performer in the 40m pileups, it only had four buried radials. The first thing I did was to bury another 30 radials around the base of the 48' tower, hoping to lower my ground losses as much as possible. With just one-third of a watt, there was no power to waste.


Back in those days, I was still working and could only get to the Mayne Island QTH on weekends. With the Friday night ferry arriving at around 8PM, by the time the woodstove had been fired-up and dinner taken care of, I very often didn't get to the Tuna Tin until around 11PM. As it turned out, the late hour operation worked out well and it didn't take long for my state total to climb. The toughest states were the New England '1's and as I neared the end, I still needed several. In late November, 40m revealed its magic-side and an early-evening 'CQ' brought replies from three W1's, all at once, each one a new state. Finally, in early December, I worked Wyoming for state number fifty!

The fifty QSL's were duly gathered and  sent to the ARRL for an official "WAS" award. Although there was no special endorsement for the Tuna Tin, other than for 'QRP', there was a nice note about it in the 'ARRL Letter' as well as in QST:


First Tuna Tin 2 WAS claimed: When the Tuna Tin 2 low-power transmitter article appeared in QST in 1976, its author Doug DeMaw, W1CER (later W1FB), envisioned it as a weekend project that could be used for short-range contacts.
Now, a quarter of a century later, a Canadian amateur has claimed the first Tuna Tin 2 Worked All States Award! Steve McDonald, VE7SL, got caught up in "Tuna Tin 2 Mania" and bought one of the popular TT2 kits. After working about 30 states with the little rig, WAS suddenly seemed plausible. McDonald realized his dream several months later when he turned in his cards for WAS. All contacts for the award had been completed while he was running about 400 mW from a Tuna Tin 2. As far as the ARRL awards folks know, this marked the first time WAS was achieved with a Tuna Tin 2--although there is no special endorsement for having done so. "Doug DeMaw knew in his heart that the rig would be useful and popular, but I don't think he ever envisioned that this little transmitter would still be working its QRP magic over 25 years after it first appeared in the pages of QST," said ARRL Lab Supervisor Ed Hare, W1RFI--himself a QRP and TT2 aficionado who has promoted the Tuna Tin 2 Revival and was McDonald's Connecticut contact for WAS. Congratulations to VE7SL on a tremendous operating accomplishment.--Ed Hare, W1RFI

Holding the battle-scarred 2N2222 in the palm of my hand reminded me of just how much excitement can be had with just a few simple parts and the magic of radio.