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Murphy had no issue waiting, I started contesting and things went wrong right at the get-go, as I was CWing "CQ CONTEST" a warning on my PC came up that I lost my internet connection. Then another message informed me my connection had been re-established. This just kept happening over and over and it was only when I was transmitting. This told me RFI was the issue, NEVER up until now have I ever had this issue but such is Murphy. 

 The contest at this point was a bit slow so I decided to investigate the issue further. I had a theory and that was my new PC motherboard has WIFI and uses two small antennas at the rear of the PC. I checked my settings and I was on WIFI, not LAN....so I thought. I removed the two small WIFI antenna thinking that they would be good at picking up RFI and thus could be the reason. I then set my LAN as the internet connection. 

After restarting my PC I was back to contesting but this time there was the loss of internet connection but not as often. Thinking now it was possibly my LAN hub at the rear of the PC. I then connected my LAN (with toroidal chokes) directly to my PC. Again I had intermittent connection issues and I was sure it was still the WIFI and maybe the antenna female connector ends on the PC motherboard were picking up RF still. The issue happened less often so removing the antennas did help.

 
It was not off to the BIOS to shut the motherboard WIFI down.....going into the BIOS.....what could go wrong here?? Once in the BIOS, I clicked here and there and just could not find any WIFI settings. Closed the BIOS and restarted the PC.
Once restarted I knew something was wrong, the PC was really slow and jerky is the best way to describe it. I went to the internet to see what the hell I had done only to find the internet now was running as if I was on dial-up! 

I have now gone from intermittent internet connection to a funky PC and very slow internet speed. Oh, and I also noticed that in my contest program N1MM+ I lost the contest macro setup and all my contacts. I have no idea what that has to do with the BIOS but it happened.
After some reading on the internet on my laptop, I concluded the best thing to do was update the BIOS and MSI motherboards they make it very easy to do. My thought was, that whatever the heck I did will be undone by a BIOS update. After all, I have nothing to lose if I wanted I could reformat the hard drive and slide a backup clone image onto the drive from my backup files on another hard drive. I would have all my programs and setting from an earlier time. Some may think I could just use Windows system restore. In times of need, I have ALWAYS had system restore let me down with a final message after a restore that windows was unable to restore to an earlier date!! 

The BIOS updated without any issues and when the PC restarted I was back to normal but the slow internet was still there and RFI seemed to be dropping the connection still. I just happened to go back to Windows 10 internet connections box (for the 100th time) but this time I noticed for some reason I was back on WIFI. I manually changed it back to LAN and the connection issue was gone and the surfing speed was back. 

I decided to restart the PC and have a look at the Windows 10 internet connections box again. After the restart, I was back on WIFI again and it would seem for some reason each time the PC was restarted it would default back to WIFI. The very slow connection was due to the fact the antennas were removed and RFI was affecting the WIFI board via the female antenna connectors.

 
I then just right-clicked on the WIFI connection icon and clicked disable!! You know what folks that did the trick. Only if 2 hours earlier I had done just that I would not have messed with the BIOS, lost my N1MM+ contest settings, squeezed behind my desk to the rear of the PC and wasted 2 hours. Sometimes the solution is just a click away!!

 In my last blog post, I had a comment from Tom a future ham and he asked me the question posted below. Since I am in Canada and my expertise is not the U.S. band plan for a technician class licence (or any other U.S. licence class for that matter) I asked him if I could start a new post featuring his question.  

The floor is your Tom...

 Hello. I thought this may be a place to get an answer. First, I am taking the test in September for my technician license. I am a CB operator and want to get into the ham world. Navy vet, electrical engineer, love radios and antenna theory. I am struggling with something. I really respect the knowledge of the amateur radio group. My struggle is understanding where the technician can operate. Google searches, YouTube searches, ARRL, Practice Tests, have yielded me the following:
1) Only HF
 2) HF and some bands of VHF
 3) Only 10-meters in HF
 4) ARRL band plan shows more
 5) HF and some bands of VFH, UHF.
Arrrgggg!!! I look at dates when I read things. This question is all over the place. Can one of you experts in here shed some light on this? Did something change? I understand the pool of questions for technician is now new as of July so maybe something changed….
Thanks for any help!!
– A future ham, Tom

 In advance, I would like to thank those who contribute to answering Tom's question. I am also sure we all wish him the best as he writes in September for his Technician licence.

 It's Tuesday early morning and I am greeting my first cup of java along with some radio time. I found myself drifting off to the weekend of radio operating. I very much enjoyed the Islands on the air contest (IOTA). It was also my plan to get K7K from Kiska island in the log as well. As the saying goes "sometimes things do not work out as planned".

I was keeping an eye on the DX clusters to see when K7K was on air and where. This year is my "year of CW" so I was looking forward to getting them in the log using CW. Again sometimes things don't work out as planned. I noticed once K7K was up and running that FT8 seemed to be their mode of choice for most of the time. I was reading on the cluster posts there were some upset ops... that very little time was spent on SSB or CW. 

I am not here to rag on FT8 and to be honest, I used this mode a great deal last year and very much enjoyed it. But having said that in my humble opinion they operated FT8 about 70-80 percent of the time and left modes such as SSB and CW alone. 

In the expeditions, defence conditions for them could not have been great and the Digi mode FT8 would sure fill their logs up and better than a poor showing in the log book. Also maybe the tide is shifting and with the Dx Peditions to come FT8 and other Digi modes may be the choice of the operators. 

I did notice K7K on their website indicated FT8 would be used but they also included CW and SSB.
There was an occasion CW and SSB were used but on a limited basis. I will chime in and say the only long period of time they used CW was in the IOTA contest. They are indeed an island and rare as well, it was expected for them to take part BUT this seemed to be the only time K7K used CW.

 I checked the clusters during the contest to see where they were. I did notice comments of frustration, K7K was operating split and some contest ops were calling on K7K calling frequency. Other comments indicated stations calling CQ contests in the responding TX frequency. Then I found they went back to FT8 in a very short time during the contest. 

This is just my humble blog opinion regarding the K7K "event" but when you indicate CW, SSB and FT8 on your site giving equal time to all would be a positive thing. From what I read in the cluster comments there were more than a few unhappy campers.

 The Islands on the air contest is sponsored by the Radio Society of Great Britain or RSGB for short. This contest is only 24 hours long and hosts some very nice DX from sometimes remote and DXpedition Islands. If memory serves me correctly I found this year to be more work to pull stations out. The QSB at this end was very deep. At one moment England was there at S5 and then gone. I'm not thinking it was just me as many stations I listened to were asking for report repeats. Oh well, it's all part and parcel of the contesting dream. 

I entered the CW-only category at 100 watts and it was the first time using my new Hustler 4BTV vertical antenna. As everyone has told me and it is true the vertical antenna is a bit noisier than my horizontal End Fed BUT I had better results with the Hustler 4BTV. The very small extra noise with the vertical was taken care of with the noise reduction on the Icom 7610. 

For me, this was not a contest where I was running (calling CQ contest) it was 99% search and pounce. The reason for this was Island stations gave you 15 points compared to 2 points for all other contacts. The Island stations for the most part were running calling CQ contest. With this contest I found it harder to move up the band and bang off contacts and the reason for this was island contacts are big points and they are limited in numbers and that equals pile-ups.
Below is the score summary: 

Here are some takeaways of mine from the contest: 

- My CW is improving so the twice-daily practice time is helping. 

- Keeping my butt in the chair even during slow times helped my score. 

- Getting my backside out of bed early on the final day of the contest gave me the rewards of contacting     New Zealand, Austria and Hawaii, along with the 15 bonus points for each.

Contesting with a vertical compared to my End Fed antenna:

- Most all the time if I could hear them I could work them. 

- Omni directional was nice compared to End Fed horizontal directional characteristics. 

-Using the Icom 7610 second receiver to its full potential. I was able to listen to another band with the second receiver. I was not able to do this with the End Fed as I needed the tuner for all bands. I found without using the tuner the receive was very poor with the End Fed.

Once the Hustler 4BTV was up it was time to see if laying the radials, burying the coax and putting the antenna mount in concrete was all worth it. The SWR checks are next, kinda the "where the rubber meets the road" In the Hustler manual as well as the DX Engineering manual basic setup measurements are given to get you started with the antenna. In the DX Engineering manual, you are informed that these measurements are based on a no radial setup. For this reason, don't be alarmed at the resonant frequency most likely will be where you don't want it.

This is not an issue as you can adjust the traps to remedy this situation. The Hustler manual informs owners that trap adjustment voids the warranty with Hustler, BUT if you purchase your Hustler vertical from DX Engineering they will still honour the warranty. I purchased my antenna in Canada and I decided to adjust the traps and take my chances. I did read the manual very carefully regarding trap adjustment and it's no big deal to do.
One BIG advantage in regards to checking and adjusting the SWR is to have an antenna analyzer. It will save you time and frustration. I have the MFJ 259B an older unit but it works great, it does not give me a sweep graphical view but I can easily plot the SWR by checking the SWR at certain frequencies. I do have the Funk Amateur FA-VA4 but for the life of me I just can't figure out how to work it.
With the antenna analyzer connected I was pleased with the rough results, below are the rough readings:

10 meters 

            28.000 1.1 to 28.900 SWR 1.2

For this reason, 10m was not touched. 

15 meters

             21.897 SWR 2.0
             21.426 SWR 1:3
             21.116 SWR 2.0 

From the above SWR numbers, the 15m trap has to be lengthened. 

20 meter 

            13.711 SWR 2.0
            13.997 SWR 1.3
            14.222 SWR 2.0

From the above SWR, the 20m trap also has to be lengthened. Before this is done the manual advises that first double check the 20m SWR after adjusting the 15m trap. 

40 meters

              6.982 SWR 2.0
              7.050 SWR 1.8
              7.168 SWR 2.0

 With the 4BTV there is no 40m trap to adjust but I can in this case make the final section of the antenna longer. Again I have to recheck this SWR when the 15m trap is adjusted and if the 20m trap still needs adjusting I have to check 40m again before any section adjustment is made.
Before any adjustments are made to any trap it is advised to mark on the tubing the factor position of the trap just in case you have to start all over again. With each of the 3 traps marked to the factor position, I proceeded to adjust the 15meter trap and make it longer. Longer meaning between 1/16 to 1/8 longer (or shorter if needed) I had to make 2 adjustments to the 15m trap to get my desired results.  I mainly use CW and and now and again FT8, therefore I wanted my best SWR results between 21.000-21.100. 

Below is the final results.

 21.000 SWR1.4 

 21.060 SWR 1.3

 21.100 SWR 1.4 

I then looked at 10 meters and it had not changed at all.

28.000 1.1 SWR

28.150 1.1 SWR

28.190 1.1 SWR

I then checked the 20m section of the band with the antenna analyzer and was very pleased to see that now no trap adjustment was needed. Below are the final results for 20 meters. 

14.000 SWR 1.1

14.030 SWR 1.3

14.100 SWR 1.4

I was not as fortunate with 40 meters the new SWR after adjusting the 15m trap was:

      6.976 SWR 2.0
      7.013 SWR 1.8
      7.219 SWR 2.0

The final section of the mast has to be made longer and one of my concerns was, is this going to mess around with the 10,15 and 20m SWR? I did not have too much extra length to play with in the final section. I ended up stopping when I had about 1.5 inches of tubing inside the lower mast section. I did not want to take any more out. Below are my final results for 40 meters. 

7.000 SWR 2.0

7.025 SWR 1.9

7.073 SWR 1.8

7.106 SWR 1.9