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 week was not that eventful, but this past weekend has been a blast!
You may know already that Saturday, August 2nd, was when the North American QSO Party – CW contest was being held. I decided to participate. Since my XYL is out of town until next week, I had nothing better to do and spent several hours on the deck at the house with a wire hung up on the end of a 33ft mast and worked NAQP-CW runners. I decided not to run this time around since I am still a bit green when it comes to accurate headcopying. I was content with doing some search & pounce work and so that’s what I did the entire time. I ended up with 49 contacts and 26 multipliers for a told score of 1274. Not amazing, compared to other more seasoned contesters, but damn good for my first attempt if I do say so myself! I’ve never had 49 contacts in one sitting in all my time playing with amateur radio. With all 49 of them being CW contacts, that makes it even more impressive. I’m proud of myself.
Sunday brought us the K1USN SST which I talked a ham friend of mine, Bryce, AD9GG, into participating. He ended up ding better than I did. Good job, Bryce! The SST is a lot of fun and I try to make sure I am outfitted with long sleeves, pants, and emergency bug repellant in time to get outside to operate for the SST. I didn’t participate last week due to our local weather but this weekend’s weather was friggin’ amazing and perfect for outdoor activities.
I hadn’t used my Yaesu FT-710 in a long time so I got it out for the SST earlier this evening. It’s been a while since I used this radio and actually had never used it to work CW so it took a while to figure out some of the bells and whistles that I needed to mess with to do things properly. It was nice to have a bit of extra oomph to send through the antenna with this radio. While I can certainly operate just fine with just the 15W max that the KX3 can put out, having 100W of power available if I want it is definitely a nice-to-have. Having that extra power will be a great thing to have when I’m running in a contest or activating a park, for example. It doesn’t make my antenna system receive any better, sadly.
That’s about it for this week, folks. 73 and happy DX my friends.
Matthew, K2MAS
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