AmateurRadio.com

The summary page of submitted scores is ready for viewing!  To check out the spreadsheet, click here.

The soapbox comments are going to take me a bit longer as there are so many!  Hope to have those up by the end of the week.

Here’s a summary of the top scores:

1st Place Overall – Sean KX9X – 17,024 points
2nd Place Overall – Gene N5GW – 17,000 points
3rd Place Overall – George KX0R – 11,700 points
4th Place Overall – Rick NK9G – 11,444 points
5th Place Overall – Mid-MO ARC N0SS – 10,276 points

Top Multi-Op Station – Mid-MO ARC N0SS – 10,276 points

Top Multi Multi Station – NAQCC N3AQC – 10,160 points

Top SSB Station – a tie between Joe KK4NWC and Lloyd KC5FM

Top Mixed Mode Station – Bill W9LR

In addition to these, the top scorer for each state will be receive a Certificate of Achievement.  You can see these stations are denoted in the comments column in the extreme right column of the spreadsheet.

Thanks to all who participated!  In addition to the 68 Skeeters who submitted log summaries, I also received 3 log summaries from Non-Skeeters who chose to operate.  In fact, Non-Skeeter George K4EOR ended up being Top Score for Georgia!

Participation was up from last year, log summary submissions were up from last year – this all bodes well for the NJQRP Skeeter Hunt for 2014!  Hope to hear your Bzzzzzzzz next year!

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

I saw this posted on QRP-L today and decided to share it here, for those of you who might not be subscribers.  This was a post by Grayson Evans, KJ7UM/TA2ZGE.  It describes his recent encounter with QRP.  You can almost feel his excitement and joy from his post!

Sorry, I have to admit that I’m not much of a QRPer.  Not because I don’t like it or not interested, it is just that I haven’t had much luck at it.  I have a hard enough time trying to make a contact with 100W out of my Kenwood something-or-other.  Part of the problem (well, probably all of the problem) is my QTH.  Very urban in the middle of Ankara, the capital city of 6 – 8 million.  S7 background noise on 20 on a good nite.  And my apartment is on the bottom floor of a 6 story concrete building surrounding on all sides by equally tall solid concrete buildings.  I have tried all sorts of antennas out the window and in the small garden, but they all seem to work equally poorly.  I currently have an end-fed “zepp” sort of thing strung between two street lights.  It seems to work the best until a big truck takes it out.

Anyway, I have two MFJ QRP rigs I bought second hand a few years ago.  One is 20M CW and SSB, 5W, the other is 40M CW only, 5W.  I did make a few contacts with them when I lived in the U.S., so at one time I know they worked.

My family (wife and 11 year old son) have started doing some camping around Turkey (not a popular activity here).  So I thought it would be a good idea to try some portable QRP operating in the forests. Never done it before. The first time a tried, I had all sorts of problems, nothing seemed to work.  Back to drawing board.

Last weekend I tried again, took more parts, two antennas (a new 20M dipole), two batteries, etc.  tuner with SWR, dummy load, and a good supply of 807’s (youngsters probably not familiar with “807s”).

This time everything seemed to work, but I could only get 1 watt out of the MFJ 20M rig (SSB and CW). OK, 1.2 watts.  Also the key input didn’t work.  I figured a no-go again.

Also it was a contest weekend. No surprise, there is some sort of contest every weekend here.  _____ “QSO party” (fill in the blank with any european or eastern european country…they are not QSO’s, and not a party).  I am not a contester but I have to admit they are good for testing antennas/rigs.

BUT, I got a big shock (emotional kind)! 

First of course, zero background noise.  Those little rigs have a nice receiver.  I could even hear myself think with headphones on.

Second (and this is the SHOCK), if the calling station was S5+, I could work em.  EVERY TIME.
I have no idea what contest I was working (the usual call sign, phony 5/9, and a sequence number), but I worked over 80 stations in a 2000 km radius over a 2-3 hr time.  I haven’t had time to look up all the screwy prefixes (“DX” to you is the norm here of course), but I recognized Romania, Central Russia, Slovenia, Poland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Slovakia, Slodowneya, etc. etc.

AND, when I mentioned I was actually running 1 Watt, I got a few stations to give me a real signal report. and they were never less than S4.  I got a few S8 and S9’s.  how could this be?

I am impressed.  This RF stuff is amazing.
I gotta try this again!

Photo is here:http://s838.photobucket.com/user/WA4GVM/media/Misc/qrpin_zpsb02e80f4.jpg.html

73, Grayson TA2ZGE/KJ7UM
(sorry this rambled)

Follow my hollow-state blog at hollowstatedesign.tumblr.com

Thanks, Grayson, for sharing.  You’ll find out that most QRPers are happier for their fellow QRP’ers success, rather than their own!  I hope you’ll be doing this again, and often!  (Hint! I still need Turkey via QRP!)

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

As I have mentioned before, in May we moved our family from the Kansas City area to Wichita, KS.  While everything is unpacked and pretty well settled in, there is still some organizing that needs to be done.

I always enjoy working special event stations. I found this one operating from an old “railroad caboose” in Burlington, NC. (N4W) I worked Randy on a 40 meter CW frequency.

The caboose (now a thing of the past) was always the last car in a long string of railroad cars and held the workers while they gathered and dropped  off “cars” along a long railroad route. In the world of today, the caboose has been eliminated and you see nothing but a “flashing light” on the last car of a long train.

Speaking of trains; West Virginia has an interesting train which is located at the Cass Scenic Railroad State Park  This old “Shay” steam locomotive climbs a very steep grade to the top of a mountain which is a little over 4,700 feet elevation.

Although not a good place to transmit because of the Green Bank Telescope (This area is part of a “quite zone” which shields the enormous radio telescope) in the valley below, it’s a great place to “monitor” all kinds of other radio broadcasts, and it’s a great place to watch the stars and listen to the sounds of nature.

And…..on top of the mountain, on a “side spur” towards the old logging town of Spruce; there’s a railroad caboose ! Popular with campers and hikers, this railroad caboose is an interesting place to spend the night. It’s rustic, but functional, and I can’t think of many places which are better for star gazing and listening for long distance radio stations.

I tend to joke, although it’s not really so much of a joke that my basic operating pattern is to operate VHF/UHF over the summer months and then HF datamodes, specifically JT65A and JT9 over the winter months. There is more flexibility in this really, but when VHF isn’t doing much, it’s HF JT65 and JT9 that I find interesting.

This morning dawned so autumnal and there was nothing to be heard on 50MHz that I decided some JT65 was probably in order. I fired up WSJTX v1.1 which I installed a few weeks ago and had a couple of nice 14MHz QSOs with CT3DL and EA7CHS to prove it all still worked.

After breakfast, I noticed that there was a beta release of WSJTX v1.2 so I downloaded it. I installed it and initially my heart sank – as there didn’t seem to be an option to select the Direct X sound drivers on transmit. You may remember if you have been reading the blog for a while that I found I needed to select these in order to transmit intelligible JT9.

I decided to go ahead anyway and if I needed to, I could rollback a version. Fortunately, this was not necessary. I had a quick listen on the monitor receiver as I transmitted both JT65A and JT9 and the signal sounded good. So, whatever there was before that was causing this problem, Joe K1JT seems to have sorted it out! I was also pleased to see that both my JT65A and JT9 transmissions were picked up by other people – so it must be decoding ok. I was particularly pleased to have my JT9 transmission picked up by TF3G in Iceland.

Initial impressions of v1.2 are good. I can see some JT65A decodes which look a bit suspect to me, but we’ll see how those go! On the positive side, I like the new power slider on the right hand side of the screen, which allows you to tweak the power down. I think this will be particularly valuable on JT9, which is exceptionally good for low power QSOs.

Series Six Episode Seventeen of the ICQ Amateur / Ham Radio Podcast has been released. The latest news, Listener Mailbag, Ed Durrant (VK2JI) discusses Full Wave Horizontal Loop Antenna, Frank Howell (K4FMH) reports from North America and Chris Howard (2E0CTH) discusses QSLing.

• Ham Radio software is made Open Source
• MacLoggerDX Version 5.48 released
• Amateur Data Interchange Format (ADIF) Standard 3.0.4 released
• MultiScan 3B SSTV made for Mac
• Thailand's first ham radio satellite
• Youngsters try ham radio
• Teacher helps students earn amateur radio licenses
• 80m ham radio band used for wideband video/data
  

Series

Six Episode Seventeen of the ICQ Amateur / Ham Radio Podcast has been
released. The latest news, Listener Mailbag, Ed Durrant (VK2JI)
discusses Full Wave horizontal Loop Antenna, Frank Howell (K4FMH)
reports from North America and Chris Howard (2E0CTH) discusses QSLing.

• Ham Radio software is made Open Source
• MacLoggerDX Version 5.48 released
• Amateur Data Interchange Format (ADIF) Standard 3.0.4 released
• MultiScan 3B SSTV made for Mac
• Thailand’s first ham radio satellite
• Youngsters try ham radio
• Teacher helps students earn amateur radio licenses
• 80m ham radio band used for wideband video/data

Ed Durrant (VK2JI) The Full Wave horizontal Loop antenna (pdf)