I spent a few hours, yesterday and today, playing in the Texas QSO Party. As annual QSO Parties go, this one must be one of the best.

With Texas being such a large state, there seemed to be a correspondingly large amount of activity. As well, Texas is a nice single-hop from here on HF and most signals, even from the numerous mobiles, were loud.

I entered in the low-power, single- operator, CW-only class and without spending huge amounts of time, ended up with 185 contacts in 117 counties. There was a very active fleet of mobile operators as well, moving from county to county and sometimes setting-up on county borderlines to provide two, three or even four counties at a time. Thanks to the dedicated mobilers ... you fellows really add a lot of interest to the contest.

Mobile stations also provide extra 'bonus' points, with 500 additional points gained each time you work the same mobile in 5 different counties. Two of them were worked in more than 15 counties, while five were worked in 10 counties. Two were worked in 9 counties, missing the extra thousand points by one more from each.

My weekly QSO Part activity has been a good way for me to ease back into contesting and an aid in improving my ear-brain-keyboarding skills ... it's been helping a lot. One area that doesn't get a lot of practice is in the 'run' mode, since most of these QSO party contacts are in the 'search and pounce' (S&P) mode. Hopefully something will come up soon where I can get more 'run' practice as this requires a higher level of alertness compared with S&P. In reality, either mode is a great way to keep your CW skills honed.

The old laptop, running Windows XP, continues to work well as does the N1MM logging software driven by the K1EL USB keying interface. Further scrubbing of the laptop's unneeded files and start-up programs has sped boot-time to about 90 seconds. Quite an improvement over the eight minutes it was taking before tackling the cleanup!

If you are interested in getting started in contest work, or getting back into it, the WA7BNM Contest Calendar is probably the best source of information ... descriptions of all of the major contests (and some not so major), as well as links to contest-sponsor pages, may be found there. As well, the same site provides the '3830' board, a place where contesters can share their claimed score totals and discuss the event immediately following a contest. It's always fun to see how you compare with other submissions in the same category.



Steve McDonald, VE7SL, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from British Columbia, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

Ham College episode 9 is now available for download.

In episode 9 we discuss the different types of resistors and potentiometers. Deciphering the resistor color code. More questions and answers from the Technical class question pool. Learn how you can win an Icom T-shirt and cap.

1:05:30

Download

YouTube

George Thomas, W5JDX, is co-host of AmateurLogic.TV, an original amateur radio video program hosted by George Thomas (W5JDX), Tommy Martin (N5ZNO), Peter Berrett (VK3PB), and Emile Diodene (KE5QKR). Contact him at [email protected].

The National Hamfest high altitude balloon flew on Saturday and Pinky Pig reached a maximum altitude of nearly 26km (25,927m / 96,873 feet) as pictured above.

The flight originally planned for Friday had to be postponed due to wind direction and restrictions but I had sort approval for both days and was able to fly on Saturday. The conditions were perfect on launch day, clear blue sky with little cloud and almost no wind.  Flight prediction put it landing around 25km away.

Both payload trackers worked flawlessly, PINKY the high speed RTTY successfully sent SSDV as well as telemetry and the backup tracker PIGLET sent the slow speed RTTY telemetry. Trackers from all over the UK as well as France, Holland and Poland received data and uploaded data to the UKHAS website.


The received SSDV images can be seen at http://ssdv.habhub.org/PINKY

The flight path can be seen below


The flight can be seen visualised in Google Earth below and while the 26km altitude was impressive it was around 4km less than I'd planned.

 
The launch certainly created a great deal of interest at the Hamfest, on the Friday we setup the club tent for South Kesteven ARS with a tracking station and demonstrated the payloads to interested visitors. Stewart (M0SDM) used his Land Rover with a push up mast for a pair of collinear X-50s so we could receive and decode.  The mast and the Land Rover generated just as much interest.

Picture by Dave M0TAZ

Andrew Garratt, MØNRD, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from East Midlands, England. Contact him at [email protected].

The National Hamfest high altitude balloon flew on Saturday and Pinky Pig reached a maximum altitude of nearly 26km (25,927m / 96,873 feet) as pictured above.

The flight originally planned for Friday had to be postponed due to wind direction and restrictions but I had sort approval for both days and was able to fly on Saturday. The conditions were perfect on launch day, clear blue sky with little cloud and almost no wind.  Flight prediction put it landing around 25km away.

Both payload trackers worked flawlessly, PINKY the high speed RTTY successfully sent SSDV as well as telemetry and the backup tracker PIGLET sent the slow speed RTTY telemetry. Trackers from all over the UK as well as France, Holland and Poland received data and uploaded data to the UKHAS website.


The received SSDV images can be seen at http://ssdv.habhub.org/PINKY

The flight path can be seen below


The flight can be seen visualised in Google Earth below and while the 26km altitude was impressive it was around 4km less than I'd planned.

 
The launch certainly created a great deal of interest at the Hamfest, on the Friday we setup the club tent for South Kesteven ARS with a tracking station and demonstrated the payloads to interested visitors. Stewart (M0SDM) used his Land Rover with a push up mast for a pair of collinear X-50s so we could receive and decode.  The mast and the Land Rover generated just as much interest.

Picture by Dave M0TAZ

Andrew Garratt, MØNRD, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from East Midlands, England. Contact him at [email protected].

This was news to me. I have never seen this before although the post on the website below was earlier this summer.  It looks like a poor man’s IC7300 and covers the same range but at QRP power levels. It is an Italian transceiver. Personally I prefer the ICOM. I have no idea about price. It looks like a “back shed job” to me.

See http://www.cqdx.ru/ham/qro-qrp/qrp-hf-transceiver-with-touch-screen/ .

On the same website are details of the Sun SDR-MB1 assembled prototype, which is another rig I have never heard about! There is a video of this at https://youtu.be/SIfvVUw0774 . This rig looks more professional and the YouTube link quotes a price of $5500. This was 3 months ago.

Roger Lapthorn, G3XBM, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cambridge, England.

K3NG has performed an important public service by tabulating the answers to the top ten amateur radio questions swirling about the interwebz. This will save thousands of hours for hams searching for this critical information.

Unfortunately, he did not include the questions, so you will have to use your imagination on that. But its not difficult.

73, Bob K0NR

The post You’ve Got Questions, We’ve Got Answers appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

Bob Witte, KØNR, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Colorado, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

Amateur Radio Weekly is curated by Cale Mooth K4HCK. Sign up free to receive ham radio's most relevant news, projects, technology and events by e-mail each week at http://www.hamweekly.com.