AmateurRadio.com

I have about 2/3rds of the 2013 Skeeter Hunt Soapbox comments Webpage composed.  Hopefully, I will finish tomorrow night and will then publish them (I’ll post the link here, of course!).  Thanks to all who submitted soapbox comments and especially for all the photos.  I only wish I was a better Web artist, so that I could give them the layout they truly deserve. Once the soapbox comments are published, I will begin printing and mailing certificates.

It is being said that we are now at the peak of sunspot Cycle 24.  Several articles have pointed to that fact. We may, or we may be not.  I am not an astronomer/astrophysicist, so I wouldn’t be able to tell you that from my own authority.

But I do know that 15 Meters has been good lately, and today’s lunch time QRP session was decent again.

In my limited amount of operating time, I worked the following stations:

HA3FTA
9A287R
DK3GI

The first two contacts were pretty much your average “bang bang” DX QSO exchanges of RSTs. The last QSO with Roland DK3GI was a little bit more in depth.  Roland who lives near Nuremberg, was pushing 200 Watts to a beam.  I also found out that it was rainy and cool where he was – it was only 15C (59F). Typical Autumn type weather.

On the other hand, we’re having a brief re-visit from Summer here in NJ. After some cool days and some downright chilly evenings the past few days, the heat and humidity have come back with a vengeance!  It was a sticky 85F (29C) here today, and it expected to go into the low 90s (32C) tomorrow.  But then clouds will come in Thursday and by the weekend, the temperature is supposed to struggle to reach 70F (21C) on Saturday and Sunday.

As Mark Twain once said this about the weather in New England:

“If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.”

The same holds true for New Jersey!

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

My  Nevada WH3080 weather station has turned out to be a five minute wonder. Barely 3 months since we installed it, it has quit working. The base unit is no longer receiving information from the sensors.

I just came inside from outdoors. There’s a small cell with a thunderstorm approaching. In fact, it’s just on the other side of town, according to the weather radar at weatherunderground.com. Nothing large enough to break the back of this heatwave, and will probably just make it feel steamier than it already does.

The backbreaking thunderstorms are supposed to arrive tomorrow. By Sunday afternoon, it is supposed to be at least 10 degrees cooler than it has been.

Today during lunch, I headed out to the Jeep once again, even though today has been the hottest day of the week, by far. 17 Meters yielded a QSO with OE3DXA, Werner near Vienna Austria, while 20 Meters was good for a QSO with N5URL, Bob in Oklahoma. The QSO with Bob fell victim to QSB. Like two old soldiers, we both just faded away.

I am going to be mixing things up a bit on the blog in the very near future. I will be having occasional guest posters. Every now and then, I get an e-mail from a QRPer who has had an interesting adventure or radio related experience. They don’t have blogs of their own, but yet are eager and willing to share. I will make the “Do More With Less” blog available to them. I think you’ll all love these guest posts and I am looking forward to them.

The other new item that you will see shortly is a new series that I have decided to call “Profiles in QRP”. These will appear once a month, where different QRPers will answer a set of questions, related to how they got started in Amateur Radio, what drew them to QRP, etc. Some of the profiles will hopefully be from some very prominent QRPers, while other profiles will be from people you may never even heard of.  I hope to get profiles from the QRP gamut …  builders, contesters, designers, everyday Joes, HOFers, etc.

I’m sure you guys have had enough of me and my situation. This blog is supposed to be about QRP and CW. Hopefully, I can bring you some interesting reading in the near future.

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

It sure has been warm here since last Sunday.  This morning I Tweeted that you know your in for a rough day when you wake up at 6:30 AM and the air conditioner has already turned itself on …… and we keep the AC set on the kind of high side here at the W2LJ household.  We try to keep the house comfortable, but not like a meat locker.  So when the cooling turns on, it’s already pretty warm in the house.

So when the weather is like this, what does a sensible QRPer do for lunch break?  Does he stay inside the nice, cool office building, kick back and maybe read for a while while eating his sandwich?

Well, maybe that’s what a wise, sensible, pragmatic QRPer does, but none of those descriptions fit me, so I headed out to the parking lot to get the Buddistick on top of the Jeep and the KX3 on the air!  When I got out there, I set out the thermometer that I brought along from home.  I set it in a shady spot, out of the direct sun, and let it sit while I operated.  The plan was to check it and snap a photo of it, after I broke the station down, but before I headed back inside.

My first band of choice was 17 Meters as it has been really good to me over the last months of lunchtime operating. However, there must have been some kind of device turned on in the Engineering Building at work, because I had terrible electronic pulse noise from 18.068 to about 18.083 MHz.  The KX3’s noise blanker (which is the best noise blanker I have ever used) put only a slight dent in the noise.  The incoming signal would have had to have been 599+ to overcome that racket.  The funny thing is that right at 18.083 MHz, it was like someone turned off a light switch and the pulse noise quite literally vanished.  The problem is that on 17 Meters, the majority of DX stations will be found on the lower portion of the band, so I decided to QSY.

On to 15 Meters!  I didn’t hear a lot of signals on the band, so I decided (for whatever reason) to do something I hardly ever do.  I went to the QRP watering hole of 21.060 MHz and actually called “CQ QRP” for a bit. Normally, the only time I do that is during a QRP Sprint or contest, but for some reason unbeknownst to me, I decided to try it today.  And strangely enough, I got an answer.  The answer came from Reiner DL5ZP.  The QSO was a tough 2X QRP affair, as QSB was fierce, but we got in an exchange of the basics.  Afterwards, I had to wonder if I was taken in by a “slim” or a “pirate” as they are better known.  DL5ZP does not appear on QRZ.com. He does kind of halfway show up on QRZCQ and DX Summit and even Google, but by not coming up on QRZ.com, I have to wonder if this was legitimate, or what.

After the QSO with DL5ZP, I went to the 20 Meter QRP watering hole and did the same thing.  This time I was answered by W7USA in Arizona, and we had a very brief QSO.  Band conditions did not seem to be the best this early afternoon.

So after I put everything away, as far as the station goes, I went and fetched the thermometer from it’s shady spot.  Here’s what it indicated:

About 96 or 97F (36C) with just under 50% humidity.  Hot enough for me to almost burn my fingers on the magmount when I lifted it off the Jeep, but not hot enough to keep me inside.

Band conditions were much better tonight for the 20 Meter QRP Foxhunt.  I managed to grab two furs tonight by working John K4BAI in Georgia and Jay KT5E in Colorado.  But I have to admit that as soon as I bagged both pelts, I shut the station down and disconnected the antennas.  The weather service is saying that this 6 day heat wave may break tomorrow afternoon with possible severe thunderstorms anytime from tomorrow afternoon into Saturday morning.  I don’t need to be driving home tomorrow afternoon, in the middle of a bad boomer, only to be worrying that I forgot to disconnect my aerials.

By the way, it’s now 11:00 PM here. The sun has been down for about 2 1/2 hours, and it’s still 84F (29C). Those are probably going to be some pretty powerful thunderstorms to break the back of this hot spell.

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

Like my good friend Jim W1PID, I also operated portable QRP today.  Like him, I had some success working Germany, Sweden and New Mexico. Unlike him, I did not have a beautiful river and pastoral country views to soothe my eyes.

Nope, I was in the parking lot at work during my lunch break – again.  But also like Jim, I got to deal with the heat.  It was just breaking the 90F (32C) mark when I got out there.  I think the sunshine reflecting back up off the asphalt pavement might be good for another few degrees.  Tomorrow, I’ll have to bring a thermometer with me and find out.

I plopped the Buddistick on top of the Jeep and found that the air temperature was not the only thing that was hot.  17 Meters seemed to be sizzling, too.  I worked two special event stations – the first being DL50FRANCE.

This station is commemorating the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Elysee.  That historic document started a period of deep friendship and cooperation between France and Germany.  Up until that point, those two countries didn’t exactly play nice together.

The other special event station I worked, and was also worked by W1PID, was SJ0SOP. This station in Sweden is on the air to promote the Sea of Peace award.

In between working these two special events, I slipped on over to 15 Meters to see if there was any activity there.  That’s where I heard Paul KW7D in New Mexico calling CQ.  He was 599 loud in New Jersey and I got a 569 in return.  We had a brief QSO and I informed Paul that 17 Meters seemed to be a lot more active than 15.  We kept our QSO short so that he could QSY on over to 17 Meters and point his Force 12 Beam antenna towards the DX that was humming on the band.

I broke down the station and headed back inside into the air conditioning. When I got back to the car to head home, it was 95F (35C).  The humidity is up there at 68%, but at least it’s not at 90% like it was last weekend.  The 90s with 90% humidity?  THAT’S miserable!

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

We arrived home from Lake George yesterday.  I went to go pick up Sandy, our cat, from the place where we took her and Jesse to be boarded while we were away.  When Sandy got home, she was as upset as I was. She was looking all over the house for her “big brother”.

They were real good buddies and it’s quite obvious that I’m not the only one around here who has a bit of a broken heart right now.

The manager of Best Friends came over and explained to me that last Tuesday morning they found Jesse laying on his bed, which wasn’t unusual at all.  He was an older dog and was no longer very active. They thought he was asleep and when they tried to wake him, well ……… he didn’t.  The manager told me that one of her own dogs did the same thing.  He was old and hanging on and hanging on and waited until she and her husband were away to pass.  I don’t know if it has any merit or not, but she told me that some dogs do that. It’s like they want to spare their owners the hardship of seeing them pass.

This house is not the same without him, and I am definitely not the same without my pal.  The sun just seems to be a little bit dimmer than it used to be. And while I am thinking of Jesse, I’d like to thank all of you who left very kind comments or sent me an e-mail with the same.  I appreciate it and thank you so much – you’re all in my prayers.

But life goes on, so even though I really wasn’t in the mood, I decided to go to the Sussex Amateur Radio Club hamfest anyway – to at least take my mind off of Jesse for a while.  I got there at 8:30 AM, about a half hour after the doors officially opened.  I got there to a double line of cars, backed up, paying admission and waiting to get in.  When was the last time you saw THAT at a hamfest that isn’t Dayton or one of the other true “biggies”?

It was sunny and hot and humid!  I was sweating just walking around at a leisurely pace.  I ran into Don W2JEK who I have worked so many times in various QRP Sprints.  I walked up to the table where he was selling stuff and shook his hand and said “Hello”.  You could tell he was taken aback for half a split second until he noticed my call sign on my cap.  We talked for a bit and then I continued to meander around.

I noticed a lot of QRP stuff on the tables.  There were at least two HW-8s and one HW-7 that I saw. There were at least two of the Chinese/TenTec HB-1As and there were several MFJ QRP rigs for sale.  I will take it as a good sign for QRP, that when I made my last pass of the tables, all the QRP equipment seemed to have been sold and in the hands of eager, new users.

There was lots of other interesting stuff, too, including this:

Argh! If my head wasn’t screwed on, I would probably forget that, too!

Rem K6BBQ wanted me to mention that he has added a SOTA category to this year’s inaugural Scorch Your Butt Off contest, coming this July. If you activate a SOTA summit, you can claim an additional 100 points to your SYBO score. Please keep in mind that this has NOTHING to do with your SOTA activation points, this is for your SYBO score only.

I had my last Pastoral Council meeting tonight, so I didn’t get the chance to put any more radials down this evening. I have served on the Parish Pastoral Council for the last four years. Two meetings a month, all year around. That may not sound like much, but there are always many peripheral duties involved, as well as peripheral events where attendance was not mandatory, but desired. The normal term of service is three years, but I was asked to, and served for four. Now that these are going to be over, I will be able to attend Amateur Radio club meetings again. I hesitated to in the past, as I always tried to keep away from being out of the house multiple nights a week. To say my attendance of club meetings was sporadic is being generous. It was, for all intent and purpose, non-existant.

This Friday evening is an Electronic Testing Society of NJ meeting. Fancy name for a repeater club meeting, eh? The group is better known as the Greenbrook repeater group, and the meetings are always the last Friday of the month. Even though this would mean being out two evenings this week, I am going to make a best effort to attend, so as to get back into the swing of things.

I also hope to attend a lot more VE sessions when license exam season starts up again in earnest this September. I have always enjoyed being a VE, going back to the days when I regularly attended and volunteered at the sessions that were offered by the Raritan Bay Radio Amateurs.

I had to go to a remote site at work today, so I didn’t get in my lunchtime QRP session, so no photos today, maybe tomorrow, weather permitting (but alas, it seems there’s a 75% chance of rain for tomorrow).

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