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.
Hey everyone. I had another fun week playing with ham radio stuff. Apart from hunting some POTA activators throughout the week, I did a bit of search & pounce on Saturday morning after hearing a bunch of ops sending CQ TEST. The LZ DX Contest was this weekend and I found it to be an invitation to get some DX contacts in the log on CW. Given my lack of contest-quality HF beams high upon tall towers, I was only able to hunt a few DX contacts, but I’ll take what I can get. I worked several stations in Italy, Germany, Netherlands, France, and Luxembourg. That last one was a real treat since the country is so small. Luxembourg is smaller than Delaware and I’ve never had a QSO with a ham in Delaware! (Are there any hams in Delaware willing to contact me?)
Sunday evening provided some rather poor conditions for operating on 20 meters, which is more or less all I can do from my QTH, at least for the K1USN Slow Speed Test. I still worked a few stations, nonetheless.
After piddling with Skookum Logger and my new Winkeyer USB on my MacBook Pro, I decided to toss in the towel and just buy a cheap Windows laptop to run N1MM+ and the Winkeyer (and other ham apps whose creators avoid macOS). I’m sure Skookum Logger could be great, but it is just much too incredibly convoluted and unintuitive to configure. This is coming from a person who has been an IT professional for the last 23 years. I love the fact that there are people who write software for macOS and offer it for free, and I really wish there were more people who did so, but we Mac users just don’t have any good options for logging software at all. MacLoggerDX is alright, but once my new laptop arrives, I can’t say that I’d justify continuing to use MLDX for my logging needs.
There were some good early Black Friday deals for some geeky stuff this week. One in particular was for the Elegoo Mega R3 Arduino starter kit, which was recommended by a friend of mine. I had purchased The Best of Arduino Projects for Ham Radio by Glen Popiel, KW5GP a while back and found several of the projects appealing. Therefore, buying an Arduino kit that provides many of the components needed to build some of the projects in the book was money well spent. At the time of this writing, the Black Friday deal is still on for the Elegoo Arduino kit. Get it while it lasts.
Also this week, I discovered VE2ZDX’s Ham Radio Toolkit, which is an amazingly useful bundle of online tools for hams. Perhaps most useful for me this week was the YouTube QSO Finder, which an op I QSO with often had listed on his QRZ page. It was really beneficial to me to be able to hear how I sound when working another CW operator from their side of the contact. It was also useful in discovering why a QSO I had logged but never received a QSL for ended up that way. At the time of this writing, there are 18 ham YouTube channels which participate in the QSO search tool. Have a look! Maybe you’ve made it into one of your favorite contact’s YouTube channel.
I do believe that will be it for this week. My apologies for getting this edition out so late today. It was busy at my house and I wasn’t able to find the time to sit at the computer until late in the evening.
73’s to you all.
Matthew, K2MAS
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