AmateurRadio.com

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

Some of us want to get rid of the Blogger Nav Bar on the top of the blog. Now we have XML templates, but how to remove the Nav Bar from a XML template, watch this video. My Blogger site is in Dutch, but I hope you understand what to do.

Paul Stam, PC4T, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from the Netherlands. Contact him at [email protected].

I had another good day out at the car today during lunch time.  Both 17 and 20 Meters were active and I nabbed three QSOs during my lunch break.

“What’s that got to do with your post title, W2LJ?” you might be asking yourself.

One of the stations I worked at lunch was HF80LOT.  You hear a call sign like that and your first impression is undoubtedly, “Huh? Where’s THAT?”  If you’re like me you prescribe to the “work ’em first, worry about the location later” theory, so that’s what I did.  It turns out that HF80LOT is a special event station in Poland that is commemorating the 80th anniversary of a trans-Atlantic flight by two Lithuanian pilots.  I sure wouldn’t have known that without the aid of QRZ or HamQTH, or one of the other fine call book services out there.  From the HF prefix, Poland was probably my last or next to last guess.  In fact, I wasn’t sure at first whether I was hearing 5F80LOT – at first I was guessing Serbia or somewhere around there.  Listening for a few times confirmed that it was HF80LOT, but I still had to look it up.  Exciting!

But lately, it seems like there’s been a smattering of special event call signs that either boggle your mind or tickle your ear in an effort to copy them correctly.  For example, here are some out of the ordinary ones that I have worked recently and you may have, too:  LZ1722SN, H70ORO, 9A282EU, LZ110RF, LZ1876SMB, and the prize winner SV2013ATGM.  Wow!  That’s a lot of letters and numbers and what’s up with you Hams in Bulgaria?  It’s almost like every one of you is running a special event this year!

Speaking of special events, I worked three more Colonies tonight, bringing my total to eleven.  Connecticut, Georgia and Pennsylvania are now in the log, and I also had a QSO with the bonus station, WM3PEN in Philadelphia, PA – Chaz behind the key.  I only need two more, New Hampshire and Maryland for the sweep.  If I can’t nab those two by the time this ends, I am going to be severely disappointed!  I’ve gotten a taste of the quarry and now I’m hungry for a clean sweep.

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].

Over the past few days if not weeks I have been getting updates on my Iphone of the solar conditions and it seemed solar flares were a dime a dozen!! Here at VE3WDM it's QRP all the way and max power is 5 watts. This evening I turned on the K3 and was not expecting to hear all that much and maybe just log some "local" QSO's. I was able to hear S573DX  and he was about an S9, I tried to make the contact using 1 watt but was only met with "VE3?" I then doubled the power and that did the trick with 2 watts for a 5NN and 2,222 miles per watt contact. I then spun the dial again and came across H70ORO from Nicaragua and was able to work him with 3 watts. I have for some reason always had trouble with South and Central America from my location but was thrilled to work him with only 3 watts for 729 miles per watt. That's not bad at all considering that part of the globe on a real good day is very hard for me to hit with a contact. Finally I was able to just at one point pick out Z33Z from the noise floor but as I was writing this post and listening Z33Z from Macedonia became an S5 signal. I decided to crank the power to a full 5 watts and give him a go. I made it but with a few repeats and Z33Z is in the log. That was it for the evening with ham radio I was very happy with the contacts that were made.
YOU GOTTA LOVE QRP!!!!
Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].

I’ve been so busy at work.over the last 2 months that I’ve barely turned a rig on. It hasn’t stopped me sending off a rant to the rsgb rag about the lack of focus on celebrating successes that our young and newcomers achieve as well as the price of new gear. That’s another story though. Needless to say I expect a few comments.

Onto more positive things. This weekend is the VHF NFD and a bunch of us will be active on 2m and 6m from corney fell. We’ll be in the single transmitter category and expect a couple of hundred contacts at best and a few gallons of tea and a hundredweight of biscuits. Definitely my kind of contest.

Looking forward to working you all…listen out for MX0WRC

Alex Hill, G7KSE, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, UK. Contact him at [email protected].

It’s been a few weeks since my last blog entry. My enthusiasm hasn’t diminished for the radio hobby; there’s just a lot going on here that demands my time. I’m still working DX but it’s almost exclusively on the 30 meter band now. I like this band; not only for DX contacts, but also casual QSO’s with local stations.

When I began this hobby, I thought 40 meters was the band of choice, and there’s still hundreds of stations here, but I find the deliberate interference and utter disrespect of operators here a bit too frustrating to deal with now. Time after time, day after day, and week after week, in the middle of a QSO, I hear the sound of a digital operator, or an experimenter, with no respect, or the courtesy of sending  QRL,  interrupting and ruining a nice conversation on the 7040 frequency.  I shudder when I think of the thousands of “rock bound” operators who now find this frequency utterly useless.

From the e-mail of a recent QRP contact: “It seems 7040 MHz is the International Tune up Frequency”.

I’m not working DX every day now. The bands just aren’t there, whether it’s due to changing seasonal conditions, the damaged gold on the capitol dome up the street, (that’s a joke) or severe weather conditions, I’m not sure. The weather certainly has gone bonkers.

On my health issue; my back pain has eased up greatly, and I can walk short distances, and even ride the bike around town now; but I get muscle cramps easily in my right leg. I’ve seen a physical therapist who has given me exercises to strengthen my “core muscles” around the spinal column. I also had an “electrical test” on the sciatic nerve running down my leg. It’s functioning around 50% of normal. Whether this will improve, or not, remains to be seen. I’m an optimist; so am “doubling up” on the exercises with the hopes of riding longer distances on the bike. I can live without the thoughts of hiking the Appalachian Trail anymore.  Hihi

I have another big decision facing me. I will be eligible for Medicare very soon now and need to decide whether to participate in the plan, or not. I received a 140 page booklet a few days ago, and can’t find “one sentence” about the cost of “deductibles” and “co-pays” that are charged by hospitals and doctors.

If you’ve read this blog for very long; you probably realize that I’m a Veteran of both the Navy and the Air Force. Speaking from experience from both the private, and military health services, I can say without a doubt, the military is the way to go.

I’m VERY happy with the Veterans services. It’s better managed and much more efficient than “civilian” medical care. I’ve said, more than once, that civilian medical care in the this country is a disgrace. IMHO—that’s still true, and will continue to be, until the new “affordable health care plan” is implemented.

John Smithson, Jr., N8ZYA, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from West Virginia, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

I’m still reconstructing my PC system after the disk got trashed. I didn’t lose any important files nor my ham radio stuff. But many of the configuration settings that Microsoft helpfully squirrels away in hidden locations like the registry or somewhere off Documents and Settings were not backed up. Mea culpa. Unfortunately I never came across a full backup system that I liked (I purchased Acronis but it was full of bugs that they want you to pay for an upgrade to sort out.

I keep on discovering things that need to be restored. I was getting some gobbledygook decodes from WSJT-X and then remembered that I needed to install Meinberg NTP. But the installation failed: the service wouldn’t start, reporting the error that “NTP failed to respond in a timely manner.” There is a note on the Meinberg website that the service might fail unless you install some Visual Studio restributable package, so I installed it but still no luck. I’ve run Meinberg NTP for years and have recommended it to everyone and it’s so annoying that I can’t install it.

Hacking the registry to up the frequency of Windows Time updates.

Nothing for it but to rely on good old Windows Time Service. I found the registry hack that lets you increase the frequency of updates. I also changed the time server to europe.pool.ntp.org which responded much more quickly that time.windows.com. Hopefully that will do the trick. I hunted for an old version of Meinberg from before 2009 which I must have installed when I first set the PC up, but no luck.

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