I wish I could have written this article ...

I was visiting DL6KAC's spiffy new HAMDigg website, I found a link to a terrific article about ham operating practices written by Mark, ON4WW, entitled simply "Operating Practice", although I think that the title of the introductory page "Let's Make DXing Enjoyable Again. Please." really says it all.

The main article should be required reading for all hams, not just for new hams (though they will probably benefit a bit more than most). Mark explains that there's precious little practical (i.e. things like what are the mechanics of a QSO, why you should use the official phonetic alphabet, etc.) information available for new hams, and uses a great analogy about getting a driver's license when talking about getting a ham license. He points out how ridiculous it would be if you got a driver's license by just taking a theoretical exam, yet that's what happens with a ham license.

As for that title of this entry, I wish I could have written this article:

• because I wish that I had enough experience to do so
• because I would love to be able to write something as useful as the article to help out others
• because it would mean that I'd have a lot less to learn :-)

I think this is the first time that I've ever done a blog entry just about someone else's article, but I just found that really terrific. Please read it, I'll bet you learn something.

SMIRK contest

I'm a bit behind in posting, but nothing terribly exciting has happened over the last week. The one thing that I did do last weekend was to make about three dozen contacts in the SMIRK Contest. SMIRK (Six Meter International Radio Klub) is an organization who's purpose is to promote the use of the 6 meter (50 mHz) amateur radio band. Like most contests on 6 meters, the general idea is to contact as many stations as possible, with each grid square being a multiplier. Two points are given for contacts with a SMIRK member (though you don't have to be one to participate), and one point given for all other contacts.

Unlike the previous weekend, where 6 meters was not "open" (meaning that all contacts were essentially "local", with almost no enhanced propagation (meaning that the signals travel via "ground wave" along the surface of the earth, rather than by bouncing off the ionosphere, which results in longer distances, and usually more, contacts), there were a number of good band opening for the SMIRK contest. As a result, in about an hour or so, I made about 1/3 as many contacts as I made during about 10 hours of operating during the previous week's ARRL VHF contest. This makes it a lot more fun, though since I didn't really plan to participate at all, I had some non-radio things to take care of and didn't spend a lot of time operating.

I wasn't even going to bother submitting my score, but my friend Larry, N4VA pointed out that nobody has been awarded first place in NJ for the past few years, so I sent in my score, thinking that perhaps my my meager 1300 point score will be enough to win the state.

The other thing that I did was to join as a member of SMIRK. In order to do this, you need to collect the SMIRK numbers of six other SMIRK members, and of course the contest provided an easy way to do that. They've made things really easy to join: you send the SMIRK numbers and callsigns of your six contacts to to club via email, and you can pay the membership fee ($6, of course) via Paypal. I got an email back from the club secretary, Dale, AA5XE the next morning with my newly-assigned SMIRK number: 6759.

6m Contest time

This past weekend was the ARRL VHF QSO Party contest. The name is a little misleading (it is a regular contest, just like others I've mentioned), and I recall something a few years ago where our club was trying to get permission from one of the nearby towns to operate as a group from one of their parks, and our liaison with the town kept telling us "Don't call it a party!", thinking that the town would assume it was one of those drinking/loud music kind of things.

Having a very modest station (compared to just about anything), I know that I'm not going to be particularly competitive, which is fine, as I don't consider myself a particularly competitive person. I generally set some pretty modest goals for myself, which usually consist of some minor improvement over the prior year's contest. This year was an exception, for two very-related reasons:

First, last year conditions were absolutely spectacular from a propagation perspective. (Although a bit more than I want to go into here, 6 meters, which for me at least is the meat-and-potatoes band for the VHF contests, is known as the "magic" band, at least in part because unlike the lower HF bands, it's almost impossible to predict any kind of propagation in advance, but when the band does "open", it seems to be "magic" that determines where your signals will go.) I set a personal best during that contest, working 69 grids over a weekend which seemed, at least for about a month, to be the best I'd ever do. (It turns out that the conditions for the CQ Worldwide VHF contest were even better, and I worked 95 grids over roughly the same period of time.) In fact, I actually won the 6m single-operator low-power category for my ARRL Section, which was probably more of a surprise to me than anyone.

Second, conditions this year were pretty awful at the beginning of the contest (and in fact, never really improved very much.) As a result, I decided that it would be nice to beat my score from 2 years ago, which is the last time during this contest that conditions were "normal". From my perspective, I think I did reasonably well this year, spending about 10 hours operating, and scoring around 5,000 points and working 28 grids on 6 meters.

Although for a pretty significant part of the contest I mostly just sat in front of the radio while the voice keyer (a device that will transmit a recorded message at set periods, saving the operator's voice) in the N1MM contest logger called CQ, occasionally a bunch of stations would turn up, and I'd get to "run" them. "Running" stations is when you basically say on the radio "Hey, I'm here, anybody want to make a contact" and stations answer you. If you get more than one or two answering at once, it can be a challenge, but a lot of fun, to "run" them.

As an aside, the "exchange" for this contest consists simply of your callsign and a specially defined indication of your location using something called the Maidenhead Locator system. In this case, my locator is FN21, so a typical exchange would sound something like this:

1. Me: CQ Contest, CQ Contest, from K2DBK FN21 (repeat a few hundred times, then):
2. Other station: N2SE
3. Me: N2SE, thanks for calling, my grid is FN21, over.
4. N2SE: I copy FN21, my grid is also FN21, over.
5. Me: Thank you for FN21, good luck in the contest. QRZ from K2DBK FN21 (QRZ technically means "who is calling me", but it's often used as a shorthand for "Next!")

Actually, in most contest, standard radio phonetics are used to reduce the possibility of errors, so it actually sounds more like:

Me: CQ Contest, CQ Contest from Kilo Two Delta Bravo Kilo, Fox November Twenty One (etc.)

Occasionally, other "fun" things happen: A brief "opening" to the mid-west or to Florida, or I'll run into a friend who I haven't spoken to on the air and we'll stop for a chat. (Because this contest was relatively "slow", I did that a bunch of times. When conditions are good, nobody wants to yak away, because you'd be missing possible contact, but when it's slow, people will stop and "rag chew" for a while.).

This time, some extra fun was that while I was CQing, I got called by 4U1UN, which is the radio station that is located at the headquarters of the United Nations, in New York City. I've worked 4U1UN many times before (because they are physically located so close to me), but this was the first time that I've ever worked them during a contest, and one of only about two times when they've called me. (Special thanks to Bernie, W3UR, who is a very well-known DXer, and who was operating 4U1UN at the time, for calling me.) Because they count as a separate "entity" they are somewhat rare for DXCC purposes, but for this contest, because they are located in NYC (and specifically in locator FN30), they actually weren't anything "special", just another contact. However, that doesn't stop it from being fun anyway.

And fun is what it's all about.

Online Logs

I'm spoiled. I started in ham radio in 2000, by which point computers had made serious inroads into our hobby. Many hams were already logging their contacts using computer-based loggers (as I do, using DX4WIN for DX logging, and N1MM's contest logger for contesting), and stations were increasingly using computers along with their radios for things like radio control and for both new (PSK31) and old (RTTY) digital modes.

But perhaps the most important thing to me about computers and ham radio is the ability to use computers in ways only indirectly connected to the actual radio itself. For example, the ability to use the Internet to research topics (such as those mentioned in the last paragraph) has made it possible to learn about things without having to run out to the library and without keeping a few dozen linear feet of books on your shelf. (Don't get me wrong, I have copies of the ARRL Handbook, the ARRL Antenna Book, and others on my shelf, and I use them with surprising, at least to me, frequency.)

One of the best "indirectly connected to radio" things has been the availability of online logs. Many rare DX stations, DXpeditions, and even regular folks provide the ability to search through their logs via the Internet. For rare countries and DXpeditions, especially those who are able to update their logs while still operating, this provides the ability for someone who has worked the station (or at least thinks that he's worked the station) to know that the contact was valid. (Or conversely, if a contact doesn't show up, it lets the operator know that another attempt to make contact is in order.)

Most of the online logs are set up in such a way that you can find if you (or anyone with a callsign) has made a contact, and usually even what band and mode was in use, but the time and date is hidden to avoid from someone with a similar call from "stealing" credit for a QSO. The operator needs to provide that specific information, which is not available online, in order to get a QSL card from the other station.

I'd been thinking for a while about making my Cayman logs available online, since I'm pretty sure that I'll have Internet access at the location where we'll be staying. My initial thought was that I'd definitely want to upload to the Logbook of the World, but I starting thinking that it would be nice to provide the logs for everyone, not just LotW users. (Though everyone should use LoTW!) I played around with some software that I'd found and had installed on a private section of my web site, but I kept running into various glitches (one package didn't support operation on 6 meters, another had been written years ago using a now-obsolete version of PHP, and I was spending more time trying to fix it than it was worth.) It then occurred to me that Chris, DL5NAM, provides a free log search to any ham at his logsearch.de web site. I signed up at Chris' site, read the instructions for uploading logs, and I was pretty much set to go.

All the logs that Chris hosts are on his website, but upon request, Chris will set up a direct search link for you. I dropped him an email, and by the next morning, Chris had taken care of that, and my logs had their own search page. I "embedded" that in a page of my own (because I wanted to be able to track usage), and I was all set. If you're interested, you can look at the ZF2DK log search page which is linked to from my main ZF2DK page. While the Cayman Islands aren't really rare, they are in demand in some parts of the world, and I hope that by providing this it will be a useful addition.

Son of Quiet Week

This was another quiet radio week. I've been busy with a number of non-radio things that, unfortunately, have had to take precedence. I know that I missed a couple of good openings on 6m, which is unfortunate, but the summer sporadic-E season is really just getting started, so there will be more. I just checked my log and discovered that since my last posting, I've only made two contacts; one was Hawaii (KH6) on 17m phone (that's a new band for me for Hawaii), and one 6m contact this morning with AA4V down in South Carolina.

One thing that I did do that was (in a way) radio related was that since my lease is up very soon on my current Chevy Trailblazer, I've started to look at either getting a new one of those, or perhaps getting something else. The radio-related part is that I've been trying to make sure that I can get a radio into the new car reasonably easily. I was looking at one car (a sedan) yesterday and was pleased to note that not only was the battery in the trunk, which is where I'd mount the body of the radio, but it had a sort of "cutout" on the side of trunk where a radio could easily be installed which would keep it out of the way of any luggage that would be put in the trunk. On top of that, it's trivial to bring the various cables forward into the passenger compartment because of the way that the rear passenger seats are built. So, we'll see what happens soon, since I do have to turn in the trailblazer in July.

One last thing: While I don't normally "re-publish" DX news, I read something today on the DX World of Ham Radio blog that I hadn't seen before, which is that the cards for N8S (Swain's Island) will be coming out starting on June 5.

Hamfest Day

Today was the spring version of the BARA hamfest.BARA (Bergen Amateur Radio Association) runs these twice a year (once in the spring, usually around Memorial Day weekend), and once in the fall (around the first weekend in October). I try to go whenever I can since it's by far the closest hamfest to my home, about 7 miles driving distance. In addition to the usual socializing, I usually buy a couple of things, which I did this time as well. I picked up a couple of spare power cables that I use with my radios, some snap-on ferrites (to see if I can keep my 6m transmissions out of my son's speakers), and I splurged with some of my birthday money to pick up a Heil "Traveler" headset and adapter for my 706, which I'll use in Cayman and elsewhere.

I picked up the headset from Gene, K2KJI, of KJI Electronics. I've bought the vast majority of my ham gear from Gene for a few reasons. First of all, I'm lucky that he's fairly local to me, so I can drive out to his store if I need something. (Ordering online is great, and I do that too, but there's nothing like having a local store that you can run into when you need something on a Saturday afternoon.) Second, Gene's prices are extremely competitive with all the major competitors (HRO, AES, Texas Towers, etc.) Finally, I like buying things from Gene because, aside from just being a nice guy in general, I've always felt that Gene's a "straight shooter". There were a few times, especially when I was just starting out, that I had gone into Gene's to pick up something, and Gene talked me out of it and into buy something less expensive. I'm reasonably sure that Gene didn't do this because perhaps his markup on the cheaper item was higher (meaning he'd make more, even though I'd pay less), but rather because he wanted to guide me to a better choice. Bravo. So that's why I try to give Gene as much business as I can. I guess I also feel that by supporting Gene, it'll keep him around in the area, and that's a really good thing.

I should mention that I have nothing at all against John, who runs Advanced Specialties, which is also in the area. (In fact, I've bought a few things from him too), I guess I just got "started" with Gene, so I tend to go back to him.

I briefly mentioned socializing at the hamfest. It seems that every time I go I not only get to meet folks who I've "eyeballed" before, but I usually run into someone that I've worked on the radio buy have never met. The honor this time goes to Dave, K2SIX, who I've spoken to many times on six meter but had never met in person. Honorable mention goes to Paul, W2PWE, not so much for him, but for getting to meet his wife, son, and daughter. (Unfortunately, I can't remember any of their names. Sorry.)

In other news (if you can call it that), the announcement that I'd sent out for my trip to Cayman has started to show up in some of the DX bulletins, which is kind of fun. The first place that I happened to see it is in the Ohio/Penn DX Bulletin, and I've also seen it on the NJDXA DX Tips page but I've heard from some other folks that they've seen it elsewhere, so I'll keep looking. It's kind of fun to see your own call in one of those.

Paperwork

Just a quick update for today. The official copy of my ZF2DK license and the import certificate arrived today from the ICTA. It's much nicer actually having the paperwork in hand than just an email message.

Yesterday, I sent out announcement to various DX-related lists and I've gotten quick notes from most of the editors thanking me for the information. I'll put in an update on the IOTA website as well, but that site seems to be down for the moment. (I did see a note a couple of days ago about the site moving.)

I also updated my website, adding a page with some basic information and I even did some propagation predictions using Hamcap. Thanks to Alex, VE3NEA, for making this available as freeware. I got to give back a little by modifying the script that he originally used to support Firefox, Safari, and other browsers as it initially only supported Internet Explorer.

More info about the upcoming trip

Since it's starting to get a little closer to the date of the trip, I figured that I'd put up a little information about when we'll be there, and some other information about the operation.

We'll be in Cayman from July 22 through July 29. As I noted earlier, this is a "vacation style" operation, so I'll be on when I'm not doing something else. The Buddistick covers all bands down to 40m, but I expect that I'll likely spend a lot of time on 20m, conditions permitting. However, I'll probably see what bands are open when I'm there, and operate accordingly. I do plan to try a little 6m if the band is open. I will primarily be operating SSB (I'd love to try CW but my skills are really not up to it) and I may operate a little PSK as well. Most likely, I'll be hanging out around the IOTA frequencies (7.060 [listening up for NA], 14.260, 18.128, 21.260, 24.950, 28.460) QSL will be to my home call, and I plan to upload the logs to LoTW (possibly even during the operation; I believe that the place where we're staying has Internet access).

If there are any particular bands that you need, please let me know and I'll try to accomodate.

ZF2DK

At last, the email that I've been waiting for came from the ICTA this morning informing me that my paperwork has been processed and I've been issued ZF2DK as my Caymanian callsign. I got a nice email from Nikki Forbes of ICTA telling me that the callsign had been issued, and asking if I'd like to have the original paperwork mailed to me or if I'd be picking it up when I arrived. Since we'll be getting there over a weekend, I asked to have it mailed to me (which should also mean that I'll have the import certificate, which will make bringing my gear into the country a lot easier.

I've already set up a page for ZF2DK on qrz.com and I'll be updating that as well as my regular ham website with a few details about the upcoming trip.

Quiet week

It was a very, very quiet week as far as anything with the radio. Between working late most nights and having bad weather a few nights, I had very little time to play radio this week.

The only thing I did of note was that thanks to Larry, N4VA, I was able to find a form that I could use to send in the fee for my Cayman license. Larry found it on a "rent-a-shack" site on Cayman so I downloaded it and faxed it to the ICTA. I still haven't heard back from them regarding either the original faxed form or the new form, but I'm trying to be patient (things moving slowly on the islands, etc.)

New Toy!

As you may know from previous posts, I've been waiting for a few weeks for my new Buddistick to arrive. There had been a delay because they ran out of the bags that they ship/store in and apparently the manufacturer was slow in filing the order.

Yesterday morning, the postman came up to the front door carrying a box, which I assumed was for someone else, since the only thing that I was expecting was the Buddistick and Budd, W3FF, hadn't told me that mine had shipped yet.

Surprise! Turns out that Budd and his son Chris had gotten the bags in and immediately shipped out my order (and many others), and didn't really have a chance to notify me. I'm not complaining.

Even nicer was the fact that we finally had a decent, no, great weekend, weather-wise. Beautiful sunny days, highs in the upper 70s, very little wind, so it was a great time to be outside.

The only minor glitch was that Budd had accidentally shipped the wrong instruction sheet in with my order, but based on what I knew, plus finding an older version of the instructions on the Buddipole Users Group (B.U.G) I really had very little trouble setting up the antenna. (Budd responded to my email about the wrong instructions and send me the correct version a few hour later). Getting it resonant on 40m is a bit tricky (and in fact, I've emailed Budd asking for some tips on this), but I did set it up on the lawn, working at the patio table with my 706 MkIIG plugged into a little 25A switcher power supply (my "travel setup"), and made a few contacts, mostly to folks in the Michigan QSO Party on 40m. One nice thing about these kinds of contests is that except for a few really big stations who are always really busy, the guys in these contests will usually have a few minutes to chat, and I asked for "real" signal reports from a few of them. The reports varied from a low of 33 to 59 (the best possible report; that's a blog entry for another time) I then switched to 20m, and made a handful of DX contacts into mostly central Europe. I don't think I'll be competing with guys with big beams and amplifiers, but for portable use this should be just fine.

Nothing back from ICTA on the form to use to send in my credit card information. If nothing shows up in the next day or soon, I guess I'll fax the info to them, and maybe just ask on the fax for the authorization form.

A little DX and some good news from Cayman

As mentioned in my last update, I worked N8S, the operation from Swains Island, for an "all-time new country". Since then, I've worked them a few more times, and now have worked them on both 17m and 20m on both phone and CW. Considering that I've only very briefly heard them on 15m and only very weakly on 30m, I'm pretty happy with the results.

I also managed to work Oman (A4) on 40m CW, which while not a new country, was pretty nice to get especially on such a low band at this point in the solar cycle.

I finally heard back from the ICTA, the folks responsible for licensing in Grand Cayman, and they sent me the proper forms for licensing and for importing my radio gear. The only problem was that although they said that they'd included a charge card authorization form (so that I can pay via credit card rather than having to get a certified check or bank draft) but it actually wasn't included with the other attachments in the email. I've sent an email back to the ICTA folks asking for the form, but if I don't hear from them in a day or so, I'll probably just fax my info to them and hope for the best.

I heard back from Budd, W3FF, regarding the buddistick. Apparently they are having a big problem with the folks that make the bags, with really long lead times. He's been told (again, apparently) that the bags are to ship "soon", but still hasn't gotten info from UPS that they are on the way. He sounded more frustrated than I am. (Well, I'm just one customer; I guess he's got a few dozen more folks all waiting.)

New Country!

In general, this week was pretty quiet. I helped out with a VE session for my club this week on Wednesday night, helped out with another VE session on Saturday, and attended an ARES meeting after that.

But the real fun this week was that I got to work the DXpedition to Swains Island, N8S. Swains became a new DXCC Entity as the result of a rules change for what qualifies as a DXCC Entity last year. At the time, there was a very short Dxpedition there, but I didn't even hear them, and did not make contact. However, on this past Friday afternoon, at about 2:30 PM local time, while working from home (no, really, I was working from home!), I did manage to work the guys on Swains on 17m CW, and although I was reasonably sure at the time that the contact was a good one, it was nice to see that my callsign is listed in their recently updated logs.


No news from either the ICTA on Cayman this week, nor from the Buddipole guys about my Buddistick. (Last I heard from Budd, W3FF, was the problem with the bags not being available.) If I don't hear from the ICTA in another day or two, I think I may try emailing the guy who is listed as the head of licensing there.

Even less than last time

I probably wouldn't have even bothered doing an update this week other than I do want to try to update this on a regular basis. Not a whole lot has been going on radio-wise.

I tried contacting some guys with ZF1 (meaning locals) ham licenses but so far haven't heard back from anyone. A little disappointing, but I'm trying to be patient. I also discovered that there were a couple of more general email addresses on the ICTA website (one for general "enquiries" and the other for licensing issues), so I sent an email to both of them today. I'm hoping that I get a response back.

Still no news on the Buddistick, I guess the bags haven't come in yet. Budd said he'd contact me when they did, and from everything I've heard about him, Budd's a man of his word, so I'll just have to wait a bit more.

I've started using a Google Spreadsheet to keep track of the things I have to do as well as the things that I need to take with me on the trip. There are doubtless many other ways of tracking these things, but the nice thing about having it up on Google is that I can get it to from any computer anywhere, so when I have one of those "have to remember to do this" things pop into my head, I can easily update the spreadsheet. You just need to have a Google ID, which of course is free, and you can use this facility. Check it out if you haven't already done so.

No news is ... um .... no news

Well, there hasn't been a lot to write about over the last couple of days for a few reasons, most of which are pretty much related. I really haven't done much radio "stuff" this week in general because I've been unusually busy at work this week. In fact, my usual evening routine of sitting at my computer and answering email, reading blogs, catching up on favorite websites, all while keeping the radio on and the spot cluster up (I use DX4WIN for general DX use, which has a spiffy feature where it will audibly announce an "interesting" spot, like a new country, so I just keep it running in the background) has been pretty disrupted since I've had to do a significant amount of work in the evenings for my "day" job. Well, as I say, if you're busy, it presumably means that you're valued and that's always a good thing.

A couple of things that I have somehow managed to squeeze in are a series of email conversations with Bruce, K0BJ, regarding operating from the Caymans, mostly about some of the locals down there, operating from ZF1A, the Cayman Amateur Radio Society club station. (Sure wish I could find a valid link for them; occasionally I've run across it, but most of the places that have links point to a now-dead link.)

The one other thing is that Bob, K0NR, suggested that I take a look at the ICTA website for information about operating down there. It looks like the ICTA is the Caymanian version of the FCC. I'd emailed one individual a while back, but hadn't heard from him, and apparently he may be quite ill, so I'm going to write to anyone else on that website that I can find who seems like they might have information about Amateur Radio licensing. Interestingly enough, there's a "Radio" tab on the page, which pops out a list of various radio services, but although Amateur Radio is included, it says "(soon)" next to it and doesn't link to anything.

Budd, W3FF, told me that there's been a delay in shipping my Buddistick because they have run out of cases, and were expecting a new batch this week, but apparently they did not arrive. I've still got plenty of time, and as anxious as I am about playing with the antenna, since the weather has finally warmed up, most of the snow has melted resulting in a significant amount of mud all over the place ... so perhaps it's just as well that I wait a bit longer to play with the new radio.

The CQ WPX SSB contest is this weekend, but given the week I've had, I'll probably pass on spending much time in it at all, and maybe just work a new band or a new country, if I happen to see anything.

Hopefully I'll have time to write to the ICTA folks and make some headway on licensing over the weekend.

A little contesting, since I was stuck home anyway

Some of you who know me may be aware that I've had some back issues lately. Nothing too horrible, but things got to the point where it was really getting annoying enough that it was time to have something done about it. I had a small procedure (done at a hospital but as an outpatient, but was probably in and out of the hospital in under 90 minutes) last Saturday, and the one real restriction was that I really needed to limit my physical activity for the next 24 hours. (Shucks, I couldn't shovel out the mess that was left from the storm. Well, I wouldn't have done that anyway, since we actually pay a guy to plow. But I digress.) As it turns out, the chair in my office/shack happens to be extremely comfortable to sit in when my back is bothering me. Well, gee, here I am in my shack, might as well play a little radio while I'm at it.

As it turns out, this was a very busy weekend for contesting, with at least a dozen contests all going on simultaneously. Over the last couple of years, encouraged by Larry, N4VA I've "played around" making a few contacts in the Virginia QSO Party.

In general, the way "QSO Party" contests work is that, like other contests, you want to make contacts with other ham stations based on a certain criteria. Generally, for state QSO party contests, folks outside of the state can work anyone inside the QSO Party state, with "multipliers" being the various counties within the state. (Virginia also has something called "Independent Cities" which also count as "mults".) You usually can only count a multiplier one time, so once you've worked, for instance, Fairfax County, you can work it again, but you can't count it as a multiplier. The rules about whether you can count a mult once only, or once per band vary with the different contests. Anyway, for folks who are inside the state, they can also work the other counties inside the state, but they can also count as mults typically things like other states and other countries (though for some contests, you only get one "mult" regardless of how many different countries you've contacted.) And to really complicate things, sometimes Canada counts as a foreign country, sometimes each province counts as a state. Yeah, it can get confusing. Generally your score is the number of contacts you've made times the number of multipliers.

Anyway, for the past few years, Larry has been a "mobile" in the Va QP, which is sort of a third option: Mobiles drive around to different places in the state, operate for a while from there, then move on to another location (another county or independent city, in the case of Virginia), and so on. The idea is that there are areas which would otherwise be unavailable, and (here's the key), it's fun. So for the last couple of years, Larry has driven around, and I'd have a lot of fun "following" his progress, while working maybe a few more stations along the way. Incidentally, in-state vs. out-of-state are considered different "classes" of operating, since in-state operators have the capability to get a lot more multipliers, which is what really helps build your score.

This year, Larry had other plans for the weekend, so he didn't operate mobile (though he did spend some time operating the contest from his home station), but after having "played" in the VaQP previously, I thought it might be fun to see how well I could do. So, I sat back in my nice comfy chair, put an ice pack on my back, and starting making some contacts in the contest. Because of the distance between NJ and Va, for the most part, you're fairly limited in which bands you can use. Generally, 40 meters works well during the day whereas 75/80 meters works after the sun sets. (There's 160 meters too, but my antenna for that band is very poor, though I did get to make a contact there.) It's sort of an interesting challenge, since the phone (voice) part of the 40m band is "shared" by European commercial shortwave broadcast stations, which, because they are running a lot more power than hams, tend to wipe out communications. The challenge when trying to operate 40m phone in the afternoon when the Europeans come in is to find an open spot and/or hope that the guy on the other end has a really strong signal (and vice-versa). Of course, the other thing you can do is to operate CW (what hams call Morse Code). Contrary to some of the recent discussions, there is still plenty of CW use, and I did make about 30% of all my contacts on CW.

When it gets a little later, you can then go and start operating on 75 and 80 meters, but while the sun is still up, with the exception of some relatively nearby very strong stations that just won't work.

I wound up probably spending around 9 hours or so "in the chair" on Saturday, and I really did have a lot of fun. I spent less time on Sunday because I was feeling better and could move around, but more importantly, it was Brett's birthday and was spending time with him setting up his new computer. Overall, it looks like I had about 56 different "mults" out of a total of 134 possible, so I was pretty happy with that. I made around 140 or so separate contacts, so I guess I did ok, considering the limitations that I have.

Again, as I've noted, I think that it's important that ham radio be fun. The emergency perspective of ham radio is absolutely, positively of vital importance, but in my perspective, you've got to be able to just plain have fun and relax and "play radio" now and then.

It looks like I might actually get to be DX!

We're still working out some of the final details, but it looks like Sharon and I, along with two of the three couples who went to the Outer Banks with us a couple of summers ago, will be spending a week on vacation in Grand Cayman. Cayman is not particularly rare as DX entities go, but I know that anytime I hear someone on with a ZF prefix on the air there is generally a pretty good-sized pileup, so I figured that if I can operate a little radio now and then, it should be a lot of fun. Fortunately, the couples that we're going with already know about "that radio thing" that I do so I don't have to explain the whole thing to them.

Aside from the actual trip logistics (which are relatively trivial, compared to going to really rare places; Cayman is an extremely civilized place with direct air flights from the US, modern electrical and telecommunications facilities, etc.), what I'm working on now is starting to get the licensing paperwork taken care of and figuring out what gear to take.

As for the paperwork, I emailed the folks who are in charge there around a week ago, and while I haven't heard anything back yet, I know that things move a bit slower in the islands, so I can be patient.

From an equipment standpoint, I'm going to bring my Icom 706 MkIIG along with a relatively lightweight switching power supply that I picked up a few years ago (same one I took to the Outer Banks.) That was the easy part, trying to figure out what to do about antennas was a little more difficult, since I don't have a lot of details about the place we'll be staying yet. I was originally thinking of bringing a G5RV (either full-sized or "shorty"), but that means that I'd need to bring a tuner, and it also means that I need to be able to string it up. Bringing along a dipole or two cut for specific bands generally solves the tuning problem, but still presents the "how do you get it up in the air?" problem.

After a little research, I've decided to purchase and take a Buddistick which is sort of the baby brother (vertical only) of W3FF's Buddipole. The Buddipole has some advantages over the 'stick in terms of flexibility of use, but the stick, with accessories, breaks down into a bag that's just over a foot long, making it pretty easy to travel with. I've had a couple of emails back and forth with Budd, W3FF, who founded the company (his son Chris now runs it), and he gave me a couple of great tips for configuration. I'm anxiously awaiting the arriving of the antenna so that I can start to play with it a bit. It does need per-band adjustment, but I'll bring my Autek VA1 antenna analyzer with me (which is also very small) which should make any adjustments a snap.

That's about it for now, hopefully I'll be able to get the licensing process started soon, since I expect that will take a while to get through. Just a quick addendum: The site that I used for info about the licensing process is OH2MCN's Worldwide Licensing Website, which has an amazing amount of information about getting licensed pretty much anywhere in the world.

BTW, if anyone reading this has any comments/suggestions/whatever, particularly about operating from Cayman, but about this kind of "lightweight vacation style" operating, please do let me know!

Let's get going with this again

Well, I see it's been quite a while since I've done any updates here. I'll try to see if I can get update more than once every couple of years. I have to admit that I've gotten a bit inspired about doing this after again after spending a while reading Scott, NE1RD's "100 Pound Dxpedition" blog which talks about (among other things) his recent trip to Monserrat. Thanks Scott.

First off, I'm going to just make this a quick entry (more coming separately) to say that my "regular" ham radio site is now at k2dbk.com (domain registration is cheap!) which at least I find easier to get to.

I've got some exciting news about a trip coming up, but I'm going to leave that for a separate posting, since last time I started a post and meant to finish it because I had "just a little more to add" it sat there for six months.

More coming soon ...

New (non-blog) ham page for K2DBK

Just a very quick update (despite the fact that I "owe" an update anyway): I've moved my ham radio home page to http://k2dbk.kozinn.com. That should be much faster to access, and I may start updating it a bit more frequently.

The Doldrums at The Bottom of The Cycle

There may be some people out there who have read this blog in the past and have wondered why I haven't posted anything since after the Outer Banks trips (other than the VE session story). Well, unfortunately, there just hasn't been a whole lot to write about. At this point in the 11-year solar cycle, things are just not all that good as far as HF propagation is concerned. Over the last month or so, pretty much all I've done has been to work some stations on 6 meters (during some occasional Sporadic E openings and during the September VHF contest), and worked a bunch of stations during the California QSO Party.

I did do a bit of mobile 6m while driving home from work, which was fun, when the bands were open. My setup is pretty simple: I have an Icom 706MkIIG (which normally acts as my home 2m/440 station). I put that in the car, usually sitting it the backpack with the head separated and sitting on the seat next to me. I use a tri-magnet mount from Lakeview (the "hamstick" folks) with a 6m stick on the roof, and that's about it. That all sits on top of my truck, and I think that I get a pretty decent groundplane from the roof of the truck (2004 Chevy Trailblazer), so it seems to get out. I actually have sticks for most HF bands, but I've always been nervous about driving home with the longer sticks on top of the truck, because for for any bands lower than 20m, the combined length of the stick, truck, and mount makes it over 14' (I think), and there are a few underpasses that I go through every day that are only at 13' 6" (which I think is the state minimum required height). I've been told that if I go through those at any kind of speed at all, the top ("stinger") part of the antenna will A) probably be bent back anyway, and B) is supposed to withstand being whacked into concrete anyway...but I haven't gotten brave enough to try. For now, I'll stick with 6m when it's open.

Other than that, I did participate in the 2005 California QSO Party, though I didn't have as much time nor make as many contacts as I would have liked to. I like to at least break 100 QSOs, but things just didn't work out for that this year. This is one of the contests that I really like to work because while there's plenty of activity to keep things busy (no calling CQ for 20 minutes or searching around to find a station to work for 30 minutes at a time), there isn't so much that a "little pistol" (meaning a station that's running a fairly low amount of power, 100 watts, in my case, with pretty low-end antennas, a G5RV, for me) can't make contacts. Plus, for the most part, even the really big stations just seem friendlier here than for some of the other big contests. I know that with my station I'm not going to win any awards, but I like to "play" in these contests, and I know that I'm actually helping out the other guys (a point is a point is a point). This is the kind of contest that I'd recommend for someone who hasn't really done any contests but would like to see what it's like.