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.
My entire Vibroplex key collection is now online. If you’re interested, you can find it at the “Morse Code Keys” link at the top of the site (desktop) or in the menu at the top of the page (mobile). I’ve not finished with the other key brands, though they are present in limited form. As I continue learning more about the Vibroplex brand and the keys I own, I’ll expand the “review” text that I’ve provided for each one. The highlight of the content I’ve provided so far, in my opinion, are the high-def photographs of each key from various angles. I lost count of the times I’ve gone searching for a photograph of a particular model so that I could compare with one found for sale and ended up asking “that looks similar, but is it the exact same?”. I feel having high-resolution images available would have helped me out a time or two, so I hope that providing them here for my keys will prove useful to others.
This Spring has been quite breezy here in northern Virginia this year. Too breezy to reliably put up even the new fiberglass mast that I purchased to replace the Explore POTA 33, which was too flimsy in any amount of wind. The few days that have brought calm weather have been spent out on the water in our new kayaks, so my time playing on the air so far this year has been short. That may change soon though, since it’s camping season.
The wife and I try to go camping once a month starting in May and ending as far into Fall as we can tolerate, which is typically October. We tent camp, so it’s always a “fun” time packing the truck up with our gear. Now that we have a pair of kayaks, it’s going to be even more “fun”. To help ensure it’s not TOO “fun”, we recently installed a Yakima LockNLoad platform on top of our vehicle. Our kayaks are inflatable, but they take up quite a bit of space in the vehicle. Having some rooftop cargo options will help us take all of our gear and not have to make too many compromises regarding what goes and what doesn’t.
Our camping trips make up the most of my POTA operating. Northern Virginia POTA parks are always extremely busy so, I don’t do a lot of POTA activations unless I’m out of the area a bit. Anyway, it is what it is.
Alright, take care everyone and for any mother’s reading this, I hope your Mother’s Day has been filled with love and appreciation.
73,
Matthew, K2MAS
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