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.
It’s become too cold outside to reliably get out much to play with the radio. I’ll need to devise some sort of solution for that if I’m going to do any POTA activating this Winter. I did buy a park-on flagpole mount that I intend to use as a way to deploy the Buddipole 18′ mast. This should enable me to operate the radio from inside the vehicle, keeping myself warm as a result. I have yet to try this deployment option out, but it sounds doable.
If you have an Elecraft KH1 and have heard of K6ARK’s KH1PP pressure paddle for that radio, but have not been able to purchase one yet, he’s finally made them available again on his Amazon storefront. At the time this article was published, the kits were still available. As soon as I get around to building mine, I’ll share an opinion of the process. The build instructions seem simple enough and really should only take some basic soldering skills and maybe a bit of dexterity necessary to work with the small components that are part of the kit. The KH1PP has consistently been rated higher than other KH1-compatible paddles in all the reviews I’ve seen or read. I’m excited to give mine a try.
This weekend brought a great opportunity for me to practice using the WinKeyer. The CQ World Wide DX Contest for CW was Friday and Saturday of this week. I used the contest as an introduction to both the WinKeyer and N1MM+, which I installed and configured on a cheap Windows laptop that I recently purchased after getting frustrated with the fit and finish of the available macOS applications for ham radio. After doing some test runs earlier in the week and getting a hang of how N1MM+ works and interfaces with the WinKeyer, I managed to work quite a few DX stations during some casual search & pounce efforts on Saturday. I had an enjoyable time with that and plan to focus on a more competitive (as much as possible given my station set up anyway) effort for the next contest in which I participate. With my only antenna option being a short EFHW and low power (20 watts is all I can push without setting off my home’s smoke detectors!), running in these contests is probably a no-go. I’m OK with S&P though, since those stations who do run, probably have better antennas that can pick up my weaker signals.
We had our first bit of freezing precipitation Sunday morning. Albeit lasting only for a short time, I woke up to a bout of freezing rain and some wind, which put a kibosh on my plans to get out of the house and on the air. Temperatures outside never got above 40ºF. Is Winter just around the corner?
If you didn’t see my Holiday shopping for hams post earlier this week, I invite you to take a look at that now. In that article, I share some of the more useful radio-related gear that I’ve either bought or discovered this year. All of it would make for great gifts for yourself or another ham in your life.
There are a pair of on-air events coming up in the next couple of weeks that I plan to practice for in the upcoming week–the North American QRP CW Club’s CW Sprint is scheduled for December 10th between 0130Z and 0330Z on 80-, 40-, and 20-meters. CW only and QRP (≤5W) are requirements. Rules can be found at the link. The second contest is the ARRL 10-Meter Contest which begins at 0000Z on December 13th and runs to 2400Z on December 14th. All participation is on 10-meters and modes allowed are CW and phone. As I hear we are possibly on the back side of Solar Cycle 25, I want to participate as much as possible on the higher HF bands while they still open up for use. In fact, I made the majority of my CQWW contacts on 10-meters this weekend and they were all DX.
That’s all I had going on this week. Thanks for hanging out for a bit.
73,
Matthew, K2MAS
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