Another week of amateur radio has expired. Expired Ham, get it? 🙂
Welcome to another issue of Expired Ham, a weekly newsletter where I discuss the ways I participated in the amateur radio hobby this week.
The weather outside is becoming more and more inviting for outdoors activities. This past weekend was no exception. Sunday, I managed to get out and finally play around with my new Wolf River Coils antenna kit that I purchased recently. I also activated a park in the Parks On The Air program for the very first time. I made 22 FT8 contacts in about an hour or so on 15-meters before calling it a day. I could have stayed longer, but Conway-Robinson Memorial State Forest does not have any restrooms available at the parking area I was playing radio from. When nature calls, pack up and drive across the road to the gas station.
I had a lot of fun activating US-5510 though. I’m taking some PTO from work this upcoming week and plan to activate the park again for a second time. I want to test and tune my new end-fed half-wave antenna as well as try activating the park on SSB as well as FT8.
Earlier in the week, I received my new portable pocket paddle from CWMORSE.US. I’ve played around with it a bit on VBand and it seems to work out pretty well. It’s lighter and more compact than the Vibroplex Iambic Standard and so will most likely be my go-to paddle for portable radio operations going forward, that is once I consider myself capable of pulling off CW QSOs.
I also ordered the QRP Labs QMX 5-band multimode 5W transceiver (60m – 15m variant). I’m order number 99303. Excited about that piece of radio kit. There is a beta firmware for the QMX that enables SSB operation. I don’t have any plans to test the beta firmware, but knowing that SSB operating is in the future for that small device is one of the reasons I chose it over the single-band (and cheaper) QCX-mini transceiver. I hope by the time I receive the QMX that I’ll be proficient enough with Morse code to be able to begin making CW QSOs. I have also been searching for the perfect QRP wire antenna. Once I have that, the QMX, and my new CWMORSE.US paddle, and a 12V battery pack, I’d be all set to basically be able to get on the radio from anywhere, anytime. I plan to carry it all with me pretty much everywhere I go if I think there would be a remote chance of getting on the air even if just for a half hour or so.
That’s all there is to say for this week. Happy DX everyone.
73 de K2MAS
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