Cool QSO - AH2R

I was working the CQWW CW Contest on Saturday afternoon just after sunset. My 10/15/20
meter beam was out of commission due a leaky trap. (Infected with water.)  I
ended working AH2R through the noise for a Zone 27 contact.  I worked them with
a 40m wire vertical using an antenna tuner to get it to tune up at 21.050.  It
was a CW contact which is pretty cool.




I heard him calling CQ but could not get his attention. I waited, and would try to
break into the pile, then wait some more. It took about 10 minutes but I was able
to complete the contact. Pretty cool given that I was using a piece of 12 gauge wire
to work have way around the world!



73 de NG0R

Broken Tribander

My TH3jr is a pretty poor excuse for an antenna. The traps are leaking so there is
water in there making the SWR increase. What a pain.



This will be the last season for the Tribander. It will be replaced with something
else... anything else... sometime next year. (Maybe we will sell the house and
move out to the country so that I can put up a real antenna.)



73 de NG0R

First Snow

We got our first snow of the season today. (No... I didn't take any pictures.) 
We got about an inch of snow sitting on top of rain and slush it won't last very long.



It is a sign that the ground is almost cold enough to sustain a real snow fall.

Antenna Tweaker

Here is a neat little circuit that I got from Paul W0AIH. He uses this circuit to
tune up each antenna when moving between SSB and CW to keep his Alpha amps happy. It
is not really an antenna tuner.... but more of a tweaker. It will handle legal limit
power. Just make sure that you perform the tune-up using low power with some thing
like RTTY.



Paul's tune-up trick is use a Drake W4 watt meter set to reverse. He then keys up
the radio using low power and the RTTY mode. Then adjust the selector switch for the
best setting including flipping the toggle switch. Then adjust the variable capacitor
for the best reading. This should be enough to allow you to use a properly tuned antenna
from one end of the band to the other end at legal limit power.



73 de NG0R

Family visit to W0AIH

I took my wife and kids over to Wisconsin to visit Paul W0AIH. I figured that they
would like to know where I disappear to a couple of times per year on contest weekends.
Paul & Mary were great hosts. Paul took Cristy, Jacob, Ben, Joe, and
me on a long walk around his property. It was fun listening to all his stories. The
kids enjoyed all of the hardware that Paul has on display. The also really enjoyed
playing with Stewart the cat.



Maybe someday my boys will be interested in trying to play with the radios and antennas
at the farm!



73 de NG0R

2004 ARRL SS SSB Contest

I spent a good part of the weekend operating the contest from the W0AIH QTH. I operated
as NG0R A 01 WI. I never got a run going on 15m or 20m which really hurt my score.
I did get some short lived runs going on 40m and some much stronger runs on 75m. 
I had a couple of hours at the 50-60 rate with the rate meter pushing the 80-90 range
frequently until I would run out of people to work after 20+ minutes. The loop
for 80m worked great.

>I cut the weekend short given that I could not get 15m & 20m to produce much
of a rate. I decided to spend the evening with my family instead.

73 de NG0R

   

Re-deploying Computers

I am in the process of rebuilding and re-deploying some computers around the house
for my wife and kids. It is incredible how much work we put into setting up a desktop
or laptop once you really factor in all of your time.

A clean machine that doesn't require any migrations is a piece of cake. For most of
us we spend most of our time migrating our applications and data. I suppose that this
is a good exercise. I like to rebuild most of the computers at home about once per
year to keep them nice and clean.

Malware

At home I am aggressively using the Google
Toolbar and Spybot on
XP Sp1 workstations and Spybot and
Sp2 features on XP workstations with SP2. My home workstations are pretty clean
so far and I tend to run automated daily scans on my workstations.

It is incredible how fast workstations at work get hit by Malware.
A couple of simple steps with things even as simple as the Google
Toolbar really cut down on the number of issues that we see.

Great Customer Service

• 
  My radio arrived in SD on Monday.
  
• 
  I had a quote for the parts & repair by Monday afternoon.
  
• 
  I had the final price for the finished repair and shipping
  by mid-day on Tuesday.
  
• 
  I had the shipping notice by Tuesday afternoon.
  
• 
  The radio should be back at my door on Thursday afternoon.
  

Granted their service is not cheap... but Burghardt has
great customer service. I am going to be really impressed if everything works when
it is back on my desk. The radio will have been gone 7 days round trip including
shipping.

2004 ARRL SS CW Contest

This year's contest was a lot more fun than last year. My score is about double my
score from last year with only a quarter of the time investment. I am a little disappointed
that I missed the last 6 sections/multipliers.




This was a pretty casual operating effort from a small gun. There was an awesome
Aurora near the end of the contest so I moved from HF over to 6m and 2m. I ended up
working a new grid on 6m to end my radio-active weekend.

The wire verticals for 40m and 80m that I added to the yard this summer worked great
and were a huge improvement over the antennas from last year. (Thanks to W0AMT
for the help installing the 1000 feet of radials this summer.)

  
 

MULTIPLIER LIST

Worked:

CT  EMA
ME  NH  RI  VT  WMA
ENY NLI NNJ NNY SNJ WNY DE  EPA MDC WPA
AL 

GA  KY  NC  NFL
SC  SFL WCF TN  VA  PR  VI  AR  LA  MS  NM  NTX
OK  STX

WTX EB  LAX
ORG SB  SCV SDG SF  SJV
SV  AZ  ID  MT  NV  OR  UT  WWA
WY 

MI  OH  WV  IL  IN  WI  CO  IA  MN  MO  NE  ND  SD  MAR
NL  QC  ON  MB 

SK  BC 

Missed:

PAC EWA AK  KS  AB  NT