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The plans for the new year are to start more often to run in the CWops mini contests. This would help my running skills to improve a lot. You can practice running with software all you want but there is nothing like the real thing. The 1 hour CWops mini tests would give me live practice twice a week. 

I would like to move a bit more away from all computer code sending during contests and try to add more of me sending exchanges, repeats and sending the station call with my amazing Begali key. The difficult part for me is switching over to the key and then back to the keyboard to juggle N1MM+ logger. 

Now here is a stretch...in contesting there is what is known as single op 2 radio! You have one radio in one ear and the other radio in the other. I don't know how they do it but then again just over a year ago I just could not understand how op's hear one station in a mess of a pile-up. I practiced and low and behold your ears get used to how to hear a call or part of a call. I digress.....My Icom 7610 has two independent receivers and I believe I could start to practice that and who knows! 

As you all know I am retired and I want to keep up with my daily walks (weather permitting) and my 1 hour of stretching that I do each day. I never want to forget how important our health and well-being is.
Well, that's about it for the plans for 2024 but no rule says I can't build and add to the goals I have.

As 2023 is on the eve of ending it has been a great year of retirement I can't believe I am heading into year 5. I am so thankful that my wife and I have had great health during the year.  

 As for my goals for 2023, some moved forward and others did not even start. At the start of 2023, I wanted to look into vinyl albums, a turn table and spin some jazz music...well that never happened. Life just seemed to get in the way of that one. My aspirations of getting a firm hold on CW head copy did not advance as far along as I would like but I am moving forward. At least I am heading in the right direction. 

I am happy to say that my reading has picked up and I have devoted an hour a day which I have been very faithful to. I have been reading fiction, Amateur radio periodicals and technical articles. I also wanted to improve on my ability to handle a pileup during contesting and I have improved with that. I have been using N1MM+ and G4FON software as they both can simulate a CW pileup situation. Finally, my CW speed has improved along with my accuracy. So overall not a bad year regarding goals completed. 

There was a "whisper goal" ( a goal that a little voice whispers in my head) to finally run in the CWops mini tests I do each week. Well, that time was this past week, the mini-contests I choose to take part in are on Wednesdays each week at 1300 and 1900 UTC. The speeds in these mini-tests can get blurry at times. The ops are top level and to be honest, running in an hour contest such as this to me is intimidating, to say the least. During the morning contest, I ran for the last 15 minutes. For the afternoon mini-contest, I ran for just about the full hour. It was bumpy at times and my nerves got the best of me but I look forward in 2024 to make this a common theme in these contests. 

I have been active with CW contesting, contacting POTA and making it into some DXpeditions. Below is my CW count for the year and it's not all about the numbers it's about having fun and that I did! They are almost double from last year. I was reading KE9V blog (as I do each day) and he was saying in a recent post
 "Those who put 10k or more in the log annually aren’t “regular” hams and need a puppy or something to distract them from radio…"
Maybe in my next post of New Year's goals and dreams, a puppy may be in the picture.

 
Thanks to everyone who reads my posts and at times puts up with the dry spells in the posting.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all who have stopped by and visited the blog. 

 The weather here for the weekend was not too great so why not spend some time on the radio? I found the Croatian 9A DX contest to take part in. The solar forecast was not promising but I thought why not spend a few hours on the radio on Saturday and see what happens? Turns out the contest was busy and I managed to practice my CW contesting.  

Below are the results:

This past weekend was the running of the ARRL 10m contest for both CW and SSB. We are in a very nice time in the solar cycle which makes the 10m contest a popular one. The weekend solar conditions were great with the Kp index floating between Kp0 and Kp1. With good solar weather meaning an active sun also comes solar storms with very high Kp index and poor conditions but this weekend was great. As always here at VE9KK I was CW only entry in the contest. Compared to last year's contest I noticed the window into Europe in the mornings did not last that long this year. I did notice more of a window opened in the afternoon toward South America. 

I heard no what might be called exotic DX at my end and most of my scoring was contacting U.S. stations. Due to the propagation of 10m here, I was on the radio at about 7 am local time and off at 5 pm. I found that after 5 pm signals were just not reliable, with many repeats and then the station would just fall off the face of the spectrum. I had a few stations contact me from the Netherlands including Bas PE4BAS a fellow blogger. We did talk a week before the contest about trying to touch base in the contest but you never know. 

I have a program called log analyzer in which you load your contest log in ADIF format (other formats are supported). The program gives you a world map of all your contacts, there are many options the program offers. I do find that if a station you contacted in the contest has an incorrect grid square then you may see an odd country you contacted. For me, the contest showed a U.S. station that was in Saudi Arabia. It was due to his incorrect grid square but that only happens very seldom. 

In this contest my best 1 hour of running was 100 contacts but most of the time it averaged in around 45-70. I did very little searching and pouncing or S&P as it is called. I enter the contest as unassisted meaning I do not use any spotting software. I do this as it gives me more of a challenge. If I entered the assisted category I would have call signs listed on the waterfall of N1MM+ contest software. I could mouse-click from one call to the next and bang off contacts and points. Also, I could see multipliers as well this way. As for me I have fun unassisted and call CQ contest and S&P the waterfall. Below are the results of this year's ARRL 10m contest. Oh and before I go I did have Murphy visit me during this contest or maybe it was just plain old age. I all of a sudden lost mouse control. No matter what I did there was no movement. I ended up restarting my PC which during a contest is a major deal. Once restarted my old age moment passed and I realized I had mouse control again. It was due to the fact I was using the mouse on the left of my desk before the restart and that is the mouse for my Linux PC!!! On the right side of my desk is my Windows mouse and I did not even realize I was using my left-hand side mouse. No restart was needed in the end after all. 

 This past Sunday I was cruzing the bands for some POTA stations and on 10m I came across a pileup and stuck around to see what it was all about. It was 7Q6M in Malawi Africa calling "CQ UP". I flipped the Icom 7610 into split and Dual Watch (Dual Watch meaning turned on the independent sub receiver). There was a large gathering at the watering hole and I took some time to listen to see how 7Q6M was working the pileup. I dropped my call a few times and then I heard them come back to me and I was in the log. 

I then a few days later logged TO9W in St Martin, now they are pretty much local to me BUT they are an ATNO and it only took the first call to get them in the log. This coming weekend is the ARRL 10m contest and I will be up and running in that in the low-power CW category. Hey if you are an SSB aficionado you also can take advantage of the 10m DX. I found that last year the DX was on early mornings then after about noon hour it was North America.

I awoke this morning to darkness and rain and according to the weather report, it's going to be all day. Over the past week, I have been having a rainy day of the mind. This happens now and then and it happens to everyone who is in the process of stretching the mind. I got up one day and for the life of me when I was doing my CW practising I was lost when it came to hearing the letters S and H. Which was which....I never had this issue for ever and now I am getting very frustrated as when I hear either of those letters I am at a loss which one it is!! At my speed of 34-36wpm if you have to stop and think you lose everything. With my practice simulator, I would replay a call sign over and over and it was only a guess when I committed to either H or S. This also made the CQ WW CW contest at times very frustrating and at times embarrassing for me. 

This has happened in the past and it's nothing new to those who are into Morse code. The word on the street is keep at it and the mind is an amazing thing and it will come around. I am happy to say that as of today for some reason I am back in the zone. I can't explain it but now when I either hear S or H I know exactly which letter it is. Below is one of my practice sessions and the proof is in the picture.