Catching up, again

I've gotten a bit behind after my burst with the three-part series about the ARRL June VHF QSO party. Things have been a bit quiet in radioland for me, and in fact, a quick look at my log shows very few contacts at all after the aforementioned contest. The most exciting contact I had was with TO5E in St. Bart's on July 3, which was a new DXCC entity on 6m for me. Unfortunately, unless a miracle happens at some point over the next few hours, I won't be able to work CY0X on Sable Island. St. Bart's is a relatively new DXCC entity, and I'd previously worked them on some other bands so working them on 6m is nice, but folks live there and it's pretty easy to get to and operate from. I was a little disappointed about missing CY0X on 6m, since although it's existed as a DXCC entity for a long time, I've never managed to work it on 6m. This time, I only heard it once, very weakly, when I was at the radio, so I'll have to wait for the next time.

As I'm sure most of you know, last weekend was ARRL Field Day, but for the first time since I became a ham, I didn't participate at all. We were in Florida to celebrate my mother-in-law's upcoming 90th birthday, and while I did consider taking the small radio with me and attempting to make a few contacts, I realized that we weren't going to have much spare time (I did have about 90 minutes free, which I spent getting a little bit of a suntan while lying around the hotel pool) but more importantly, since we were trying to avoid checking our bags (our trip to Florida was Friday to Sunday), I realized that there was just no way that I'd get the radio and even the smallest antenna I have (the Buddistick) into the carry-on bag I was taking. The past two trips that I've gone down I've taking the radio and operated from Lido Key, which is IOTA NA-034, but unfortunately it didn't work out this time. The closest I got to operating was when I happened to drive past what I realized was the Sarasota Emergency Radio Club's Field Day site. I'd looked it up prior to going to Florida, but  never had a chance to stop by. By pure chance, a route back to the hotel from one of the family functions took me right by there. The next morning, there was a blurb about them on TV, and I'm really sorry that I didn't have a little more spare time to at least stop by.

Despite the fact that I've managed to get a five-day weekend out of the Fourth of July holiday (with the holiday falling on a Friday and my company giving me Monday off as well, I took Thursday the third off to give myself even more time), I haven't really gotten much done on the radio. 6m has been open to at least somewhere every day, but I've had enough things to do that I never seemed to have managed to gotten on the radio as much as I'd like.

As a follow-up, about a month ago I posted a poll asking how folks read this blog. I got 25 responses of which 11 were via an RSS feed and the rest were pretty evenly split between those of you who visit here directly, people who get the feed via email (if you'd like to do that, there's a link right on the main page at the blog website where you can sign up), people who read this via another website (I'd be curious to hear from those of you who do that rather than come here directly; either leave a comment or email me directly) and those of you who read it via the N0HR tool bar. Thanks to those of you who participated.

On a personal note, some of you know that my son, Justin (KC2MCS) has been suffering with a rather serious back problem for well over 2 years. After trying everything else, he's scheduled to have spinal fusion surgery in a little over a week. We are, as they say, cautiously optimistic that this will allow him to get back to a normal life.