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.
POTA park number 3 in the log.
I activated Powhatan State Park in Powhatan, Virginia this past weekend (hence why this post is a day late). I only activated via FT8 again. I really need to get rid of the mic fright and activate these parks SSB sometime. The more I do that, the better I will become at it. I also want to try to activate a park via CW soon. FT8 was how it happened this weekend though, and that’s OK. I’ll try again next month at Lake Anna State Park.
I struggled a bit with CW practice early in the week and it showed during our CW Academy session with our class’s advisor on Monday night. My sending test was terrible and I just could not for the life of me get a handle on my dit control. Afterward, I played around a bit to see if I could diagnose what had happened. The best theory I came up with was that I was sending too slow and my subconscious brain was instructing my fingers to get off the paddles because too much time had passed while sending each character. Since we’ve been learning to instantly recognize characters are 25 WPM this whole time, I guess I should send characters at 25 WPM as well. This seems logical to me and to test the theory, I turned up my keyer speed to 25 WPM (from 20-22 WPM) and found that I had far fewer mistakes in my sending, especially for characters with trailing dits, like five, six, and B. I really, really, really want to get proficient at CW because I really enjoy the act of sending and receiving Morse code, even though I’ve yet to do so on the air. The few QSOs I’ve had on vBand have been really fun. I can only imagine on-air QSOs are more of an adrenaline rush.
In other news, I bought an Elecraft KX3 transceiver this week which should arrive in the next day or two. I’m excited about that radio. Even though I don’t need the radio, it was such a good deal that it was not possible to pass on it. I’m sure I’ll get a lot of use out of it since the Elecraft AX1 vertical whip antenna is included. This means no antennas to deploy into trees and things like that. All I’ll need is a battery and the radio and I’ll be able to get on air from almost anywhere.
73s,
Matthew K2MAS
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