For the 50th anniversary of the Vienna Wireless Society, the club operated under a special event call sign: W5O. As usual, there was a good turn out of club members for both the picnic and on-air activities. We put a couple rockmites, FT817s, and a KX3 on the air, and accumulated 62 contacts in our [...]
|
||||||
|
|
It occurs to me that I’ll likely be writing about the Significant Other project for a while, so it now gets its own category on the blog. I’ll go back and fix the tagging on older posts to be consistent. The main board and relay board prototypes are in a final enough state that I [...] For a few months, I’ve been playing working on a design for a QRP accessory as a way of becoming familiar with both the arduino platform and homebrewing technique. The basic idea was to put everything except a transceiver in one box, so I couldn’t leave anything behind when operating in the field. I [...] Initially, I hadn’t given the power supply for the Significant Other project too much thought: I was more focused on the microcontroller, relays, and so on. After going for maximum efficiency with these components, though, it began to annoy me that it would be very wasteful to use an LM7805 regulator to bring lead acid [...] I was sent on fairly short notice to attend a meeting at Lake Tahoe, which is just south of Reno along the California/Nevada border. I had one free evening before the conference, and it just happened to fall on the date of an NAQCC Sprint. I gave serious thought to throwing a wire out the [...] There are a limited number of SOTA peaks within a short drive of Washington, DC, and most of them, particularly the ones with zero activations, are on private property. After spending a little time with the SOTA database, I found one promising peak less than an hour’s drive away: Lambs Knoll, W3/WE-007. The most attractive [...] The weekend was the QRP TTF event, and this year’s rules favored stations that did double duty as SOTA (summits on the air) stations. The Vienna Wireless Society made its annual pilgrimage to Glyndon Park in Vienna, Virginia, and I was sorely tempted to hang out there and partake in the barbecuage. However, the SOTA [...] The peak of signal mountain. Photo taken from our operating position, looking north. Our visit to Signal Mountain, Virginia was successful, and summit W4/SH-049 has been activated for the first time (and perhaps the only time for the forseeable future). We made a total of 19 QSOs, which we thought was reasonable for our [...] I had a great run in the March NAQCC sprint, a two hour QRP CW sprint that encourages the use of straight keys. I am surprised (but pleased) to see that I took the top position in the W4 division for simple wire antennas. I think this speaks to good conditions where I was operating, [...] It’s still barely the first week in January, so I’m going to do a little retrospective on contests entered in 2011. Some contests I just hear on the air and jump into (particularly QSO parties), others I obsessively prepare for over several months (like the Indiana QSO Party, Operation Sizzling Pork). Usually, though, I don’t [...] |
|||||
|
Copyright © 2013 Dhakajack - All Rights Reserved |
||||||