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.
Let me open up with a moment of silence for Markus Baseler, DL6YYM, the man behind BaMaTech Feinmechanik, the maker of the popular BaMaKey Morse Code paddles and other things, who recently passed away. May he rest in peace.
I took the last two weeks off from posting an issue of Expired Ham. The first was by accident and I just rolled with it and the second was because I was on a camping trip and didn’t have a connection to the internet.
Apart from that, some good things going on in the last couple of weeks in this neck of the woods. The CWOps CW Academy Intermediate class began recently and has been going really well so far. This advisor is quite different than who we had for my Fundamental course a few months back. My Intermediate advisor taught Kurt Zoglmann, the guy behind the very popular Morse Ninja CW training. So, that’s pretty cool.
Besides the CWA practice, I’ve been working on expanding my CW QSO log count by participating in a number of CW contests and events regularly. Besides for Parks On The Air, I mostly hunt but I’ve so far worked the K1USN Slow Speed Test a number of times as well as the recent CWOps CW Open contest, where I made a whopping 8 contacts in the hour and a half in which I was able to participate. I can’t say it often enough that I’m having a really fun time with the CW radio stuff.
The wife and I had a great camping trip recently during Labor Day weekend. We camped at Douthat State Park in the southwest part of Virginia. It was actually quite nice to be isolated from the internet for an entire weekend. The terrain seemed to affect how well I could get a radio signal out while trying to activate the park for Parks On The Air, but I managed to get the ten contacts needed by pairing the POTA activation with an hour of K1USN slow speed test hunting. It was also nice that I was able to more fully test the Elecraft KH1 transceiver that I recently purchased secondhand. The radio struggles to be heard when using it at my home QTH, rarely being heard on the RBN. It seemed like everything worked properly with the radio when out in the field so I guess it’s just a location thing. I also finally used my new-to-me Buddipole Deluxe antenna during the camping trip. The antenna was easy to deploy and tune and I’m thinking of writing up a review of it soon.
On that note, there are several reviews I’d like to do on the various ham gear that I now own. Keep a lookout for those in the coming months.
Vy 73,
Matthew, K2MAS
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