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The weekend started with a great surprise on Friday at lunchtime. My good friend Dennis KE9UA invited me over to his QTH to try to work K1N. Dennis is a serious DXer. The picture above shows the gorgeous SteppIR in his backyard. This picture was taken as I headed out after working K1N on my first call. Yep, barefoot at 100 watts on 20m. What a hoot! I smiled the rest of the weekend, and I’m smiling now writing this three days later.

Saturday morning brought me back to the big city to take a look at the WX9WX dstar machine. Coverage wasn’t as good as expected, and because of the great logging of the G4KLX software I could see that we had a problem. The duplexer we were using wasn’t providing enough isolation, resulting in receiver desense. I usually check this when building a new system but somehow forgot this step this time. A quick swap to a much better duplexer and the problem was solved.

Sunday was a day of rest…church then grilling of steaks, took a nap, then tinkered in the barn until it was too cold to be outside. A nice 2M net with friends on the Clinton IL repeater rounded out a fun weekend. I love this hobby!