AmateurRadio.com

from Tim, W3ATB.  Not only a beautiful location, but an answer to those new to portable QRP ops who are wondering, “How do they do it?”

Thanks, Tim and I’m glad you enjoyed yourself! THAT is the whole point of this event – for folks to get out and enjoy themselves (Skeeter bites, and all!).

Oh ….. I also added Tim’s blog to the blogroll. Make sure to check it out!

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

Here’s a video by Dennis Blanchard, K1YPP who is also the author of “Three Hundred Zeros”

Dennis hiked the Appalachian Trail, among other places and has lived to tell us all about it.  If you haven’t read his book, then you’re missing a good read.  While there’s not a whole lot in devoted to Amatuer Radio, it is a good read nonetheless, and inspiring, too.

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

First, before a brief discussion of 15 Meters, I’d like to share a video on QRP – actually it’s HamRadioNow Episode 93 – “QRP (Life’s Long Enough …….).  This was pointed out by Norm WA4ZXV on the nogaqrp e-mail reflector.

The episode is about an hour long, though, so before starting it, you might want to pop some popcorn and open up a cold one and get comfortable for a bit.  (It’s instances like this where tablets and other hand held devices really soar!)

Now on to 15 Meters.  The past few days during lunch, I have been noticing some very loud signals on 15 Meters, even though various propagation tables have been calling for only “fair” conditions on the band. There were a few loud Europeans and South Americans on the band, but I was being beat out in the pileups by stronger signals (Them’s the breaks).  Rather than give up on the band totally, I decided to go on up to venerable ol’ 21.060 MHz and put out the CQ call for a lil’ bit.

I was rewarded with a call from Bert F6HKA who is very well known on the CW portions of the bands. Bert and I have QSO’ed before, but always in a contest situation.  It was nice to be able to spend a few minutes with him today, actually chatting for a bit.

A top o’ the callsign cap to Wey Walker K8EAB from the NoGa QRP group for pointing me towards this video by K7AGE:

Even if you don’t care for the subject matter, the music’s pretty catchy!

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

Today was a strange day.  It was my last day at my current job at Goldman Sachs. I’ve been there just over six years, managing all the Technology Department inventory (servers and networking and storage equipment) for the offices of the NY/NJ Campus.  I was the manager of the department responsible for receiving, inventorying, warehousing, and prepping for install a multi-billion dollar cache of equipment. I was also responsible for shipping re-purposed equipment both domestically and internationally. Believe me, you haven’t lived until you’ve been tasked with shipping millions of dollars of used equipment to places like Seoul, Sao Paolo, and Kuala Lumpur, and you were told it had to arrived undamaged (even though the original shipping containers had since long been discarded) and it had to arrive “yesterday”. I can proudly attest that in the six years that I was there, my department oversaw that inventory with a shrinkage percentage (loss due to theft, damage or mis-shipping) of less than 0.001%.

Last summer, Goldman felt that they had too many vendors, so they decided to downsize the number that they have on board. Our contract was farmed out to another vendor, and while my team was RIF’ed (reduction in force) I stayed on for six months to basically teach my replacements how to do the job.  My actual employer is Pitney Bowes Management Services, and through them, I will be starting at a new, non-management (actually glad for that, for a change) position with IBM next week.

My co-workers, the other outside vendors (IPC, Scholes, EMC, CBRE) who also serve Goldman Sachs are the best.  Totally unexpected, I walked into work this morning to find this waiting for me on my desk.