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The progress of my new basement ham shack has taken another turn towards completion with the recent work completed on Saturday, 14 April.   If you recall, on 12 March (over a month ago) I blogged about the accomplishment of having the walls completed.  I had every intention of taking a weekend off and getting started on the ceiling prior to the end of March. 

Best laid plans…blah blah blah.  The weather in Colorado is I guess much like anywhere else.  Wait 5 minutes and it is guaranteed to change.  The immediate weekend after the walls went up was supposed to be nice.  However, it ended up windy/cooler and we delayed the outside painting project by one weekend.  This delay sort of shifted everything else on the schedule.  So we ended up doing the outdoors projects on the weekend of 24 March.  I did the sheet metal work for the AC/Heat duct work on 31 March.  Then on Saturday, 7 April I spent the day giving a presentation on summits on the air followed by a SOTA activation. 

As I had discussed, I rented a drywall lift and picked it up on Friday evening just before 8 PM.  This would allow me to get started early on Saturday without the need of running to the rental store.  I set my alarm as if it were a normal work day.  I allowed myself time for coffee and even some HF radio time.  With this being the 100th Anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, I really wanted to work a couple of the special event stations commemorating the event.  I worked K3MGY and W4S and decided it was time to go to work. 

While the drywall lift was a bit awkward in some of the tight places of the basement, it really saved the day.  Essentially you just place a 4×8 sheet of drywall on the lift and crank it into position.  Then screw it into position, lower the lift and finish adding screws.    Then repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat until all done. 

It was our goal to complete the ceiling in one day.  It’s not that we couldn’t afford to rent the drywall lift for another 24 hours, it was simply the desire to just get the work done in one day.  The last piece of drywall was securely fastened on the ceiling at just before 6:30 PM.  This left me enough time to shower and return the lift with time to spare. 

The below three pictures were taken showing progress from the same vantage point (or very close).  We started on the walls the weekend of 25 February and finished the ceiling on 14 April.  While this sets no drywall hanging speed records and I’d go broke if I were a professional drywall installer (which I’m not and never want to be after this experience) all work has been done by my wife and I. 

Of course, now begins the messy phase of the project.  Over the next week or two, we plan to start the taping, mudding and sanding.  Like anything else, if you don’t regularly do this type of work there is a learning curve and as you progress you get a little better and a little faster.  I’m not sure when it will get completed.  I guess I’ll just say that we’ll get it done, when we get it done.  We have a tremendous amount of work to still complete.

Oh….I did receive notice on Friday, 13 April to expect my Elecraft KX3 to ship sometime the week of 16 April – 20 April.  I’m sure I will have a strong desire to take it on top of a Colorado summit for SOTA in the next couple of weeks. 

Final comment.  Each corner we turn in the overall progress, I do see the end result and it makes me extremely proud to be doing this work myself.  I’m not sure of the exact date I’ll officially move into the new space.  At this point my goal is to be 100% complete and moved into the new space prior to the Colorado QSO Party which will take place the first weekend in September.    It truly is my desire to operate in my State’s QSO party from inside the new space. 

Until next time…

73 de KDØBIK

Jerry Taylor, KD0BIK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Colorado, USA. He is the host of the Practical Amateur Radio Podcast. Contact him at [email protected].

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

Larry Makoski, W2LJ, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Jersey, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

The view from JY5HX's beam

On Saturday afternoon I was able to spend an hour on the rig....well the rig was on in the background as I was tiding up some "stuff" on the PC. I have been reading on different blogs about poor conditions over the past week or so. I was reading this morning that things are going to pickup again with some new sunspots making there way around to earths side of things. Anyway......Yesterday I was able to snag W0S which is a special event station commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Titanic. The contact was made on 20m with 2 watts at this end. I was reading (see W0S link above) on the Southgate Amateur radio new site that W0S was also running QRP. I was surprised to read this as he had a great signal into Ontario. We exchanged names, QTH and reports then he moved on to the next in line. W0S is located in Branson Missouri and they had a station setup outside the Titanic Museum in downtown Branson.

Just a short time later on 20m's TM27UFT out of  France had a pileup and I jumped in to see what would happen with my 2 watts. This again is another special event station out of France. It was for the Union Francaise des Telegraphistes 27th meeting. I made contact after 4 tries and because of the pileup he had it was strictly business and off to the next station in the Q.
The big event of the day for me was seeing a spot on the cluster for JY5HX out of Jordan. If  I made this contact it was another DXCC for me and a first for contacting anyone in the middle East. So this was serous business I cranked the K3 up to 5 watts as my Jubilee DXCC is going to be all QRP. I double clicked on the spot and to my surprise I could hear JY5HX from just above the noise level to about an S3 at times. There have been many times when I see a spot on the cluster and head there to just hear noise so this sure was a surprise.  On went the headphones and so began my what I thought to be a long round of calling into the pileup. Funny thing was there was no pileup and the next funny but great thing was he came back to me on my third call to him. Now JY5HX is in the log book and that brings my QRP DXCC count up to 68! Using 5 watts along with my attic dipole for this contact it turned out to be 1172 miles per watt.
Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

I haven’t made that many DSTAR QSOs over the winter, but over the last few weeks, as I have been spending a bit more time outside in the garden on a Sunday morning, I have been getting back into the habit of connecting the DVAP access point up to a reflector and having some gentle QSOs as I potter about the back garden, perhaps cleaning out the henhouse or weeding!

This morning, for example, I made a nice QSO with John EA3WR/M in Barcelona and Marc W6IWW/M (returning home after a late night poker game in LA!) as I was clearing out one of our cold frames.

Some months ago, I mentioned that I had been using the Win-DV software from Dutch Star which is still the first choice software that I use with the DVAP. There have been some updates over recent months and the latest version is now 1.5.2 which contains D-RATS support (which I haven’t tried yet) as well as various other updates. It is also nice to have the flexibility of being able to link and unlink reflectors and repeaters via RF which saves coming into the house to the computer and linking from there.

Tim Kirby, G4VXE, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Oxfordshire, England. Contact him at [email protected].

Kenwood took out a full page back cover ad in this month’s QST hinting at a new HF rig being unveiled at Dayton.  What could it be?  Another super multi-kilobuck uber contester rig?  A KX3 competitor?  A fun little rig like the Yaesu FT-817?  Inquiring minds want to know!

A topic being discussed on the CWOps e-mail reflector is about two letters to the editor in the May issue of QST.  I won’t re-print them here. If you get QST, they are to be found on page 24 and the header is “Proud to be a No-Code Extra”. These are in response to another letter to the editor in the April edition of QST bemoaning the fact that the Extra license “is not what it used to be” now that the code requirement is gone (in essence – not the exact words).

The authors of the May letters are steamed by the concept that they are some how inferior because they did not pass the 20 WPM Morse Code test that used to be required to earn Amateur Extra.

I guess they have a point; but as usual – both sides of the arguement have their merit.

Perhaps what we need to do is just get over with labeling everything!  It seems all human beings (not just Hams) love to do that – label, compartmentalize, file and designate.  The problem is, as human beings, we rarely fit neatly into any one compartment.

Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat, gay, straight, Extra, General, Technician, and on an on and on and on until it makes your head swim. And don’t let’s get started on the nationalities or religions – too many to begin even thinking about listing here for the purposes of this discussion.

I think one of the worse trends that has ever happened in the last few years is all this “celebration of diversity”.   Seriously. We have come to the point where we concentrate too much on what makes us different instead of how so many of us are so much the same.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t meant that we should ignore our differences – we should not all become just some amorphous, giant blob of humanity. We should be proud of our races, nationalities, creeds – but not to the point where they become exclusionary.  We need to look at each other, as well ……. people.

Whether you’re white, black, brown, red, yellow, or purple – whether you’re a man or woman, whether you’re Polish, Italian, Kenyan, Afghanistani or whatever – we all have the same needs and dreams.  We want roofs over our heads, food on our tables, and we want our kids to have a better life than we’ve had. We want to be loved.

Once we realize that despite our apparent differences, that we’re all basically the same – maybe then we’ll truly have peace some day.  Pie in the sky?  Maybe.

Sorry – I didn’t mean to get all “Kumbaya” on you; but some times I get really tired of what are basically, silly arguments that in the end, don’t amount to a hill of beans.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

Larry Makoski, W2LJ, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Jersey, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

A different picture of 10m propagation than a week ago. The band was dead for most of the morning. Then I started to receive and be spotted by German stations at around 1200km distance – weak Sporadic-E I think.

10m WSPR spots for G4ILO – 13 April 2012

Someone asked me whether these WSPR spots were obtained using the Propeller beacon I have been writing about. I’m afraid not. I haven’t managed to solve the frequency stability problems of my Gadget Gangster board so I’ve been using my K3 for transmit and receive.

Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].