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Thailand (9181 km) was one of the spots today with WSPR 500mW on 10 meter. Also spotted by PY2RN (9786 km) with 500 mW. My stats with WSPR 500mW are now 32 DXCC and 15 US States.

Not strictly Ham Radio but worthy of a mention, I dropped into the BEC Fab Lab today to talk to them about laser cutting some cases for our clubs summer build. We’ll be doing something simple this year ( the Hans Summers, GoUPL Ultimate QRSS kit v3 – mine is on order) and I’m keen to tie in what we do with them as we could use their services and they could potentially open up amateur radio to a wider audience.

I was really impressed and can’t wait to get my hands on their 3d printer, I just don’t know what I ought to print…perhaps a callsign badge

BEC Fab Lab

1) Worked a few more DX stations today during lunch. The bands were decent again.Had QSOs with TI8/AA1M in Costa Rica, LZ2HR in Bulgaria and F6ALQ in France.  The QSO with Bernard in Soissons, France was a bit more than just your typical “599 TU” DX QSO. We actually conversed a bit! Wow …. Amateur Radio is actually well suited for conversation, don’t ya know?!?  Next few days look like rain, so I probably won’t take the gear with me to work tomorrow.

2) Got skunked in the 80 Meter Fox Hunt tonight. I almost worked Ray K9XE in Illinois as he had three out of the four characters of my call sign several times.  But he stated more than a few times throughout the hunt that he had S9 noise on his end. Oh well, he tried and I tried – no fault in that.

3) The date and time are set for the 2014 NJQRP Skeeter Hunt – Sunday, August 10th. You can check either  http://www.qsl.net/w2lj/, or the Skeeter Hunt page of this blog.  The exchange is a bit different this year. Instead of RST, I decided to go with the op’s first name instead. Just trying to be a little different this year. Oh, and Skeeter numbers will be given out starting on June 21st, the First Day of Summer – so please, don’t try to sweet talk a number out of me before then, OK?

Oh, and I had a Skeeter professionally drawn for this year’s logo. Here he is:

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

As you can see, I have 3 confirmation requests waiting. Though I like QRZ logbook, but when I want to confirm I have to fill out the QSO again. Before I had to check, and ready. Now I have to look up QSO data... etc Oh no... too much work. Or do I something wrong?

Most of the embarrassment has faded away, so I can write about it now. Having my Cubieboard up and running I went for the next step, connecting my TNC for APRS operation. The Cubieboard has a UART port, but the supplied cable was for a USB connection. I still had my serial converter from my Raspberry Pi and tried to hook it up to the Cubieboard. Either I made a short or some Volts went where they shouldn’t have gone, but all of a sudden there was smoke and that is usually not a good sign.

So now I have two empty cases on my shelf: one for the Raspberry Pi, one for the Cubieboard. Ah well, that’s life. Luckily these mini-PCs are not expensive, but to me also not cheap, so I will wait a while before ordering another.