The Nerkspedition to Sky House is underway. We arrived in LA a couple days ago and drove up the 101 to around San Luis Obispo yesterday. The final road to Sky House is a long, winding dirt road that hairpins its way up a mountain to a fabulous house that overlooks neighboring mountains, Morro Bay, and the Pacific Ocean. Most of the first day was spent getting everyone unpacked and settled.
Earlier today, I set up the FT817 for local repeaters in San Luis Obispo and Los Osos. No problem hitting them with full quieting from the top of the mountain, but not a lot of activity on them.
Even though this is the IARU World Championship weekend, I didn’t bother setting up for HF today given the solar activity: strong wake from a CME and an intensely south vectoring magnetic field. By report, the bands were pretty dead earlier except for sporadic E on 6m later in the day.
I’m hoping tomorrow will be better, so I tossed the 40m half wave dipole antenna into the trees at the top of the mountain. The wire comes down near a comfy chair next to the pool, and if conditions are better on Monday or Tuesday, I’ll give HF a try.
Immediately before leaving for California, I noticed that both my winkeyer and SLT+ antenna tuner had developed rattles. I have to assume that this happened during my last flight back, which had involved a bumpy segment on a regional jet from Reno to LAX. Either that, or the TSA got more curious than usual and looked inside them. The winkeyer was missing a screw and the rest of the screws were loose, but there was no internal damage. For the SLT+, however, L1 had fallen off the pc board. I rewound the toroid and soldered it in while I was packing my bags for this trip and as an extra measure tacked all the coils down with hot glue.