Where to begin?
Start at the beginning, or somewhere else, but start.
My accreditation as an examiner got renewed this week, which is a good thing, since I still have exams coming up from time to time. I thought I had started things in motion weeks ago, but something got dropped, probably on my end. A follow up got things unplugged again and all’s well that ends well.
EMRG no more …
Speaking of endings, the Emergency Measures Radio Group, EMRG, has finally wound up. It has been a bit of a zombie organization for some time now, with no meetings, training or exercises in a long time. I guess the last EMRG events were the repeater tests which seem to have ended in June 2020. The website will remain, as will the packet infrastructure (which is how you are getting this) and repeaters, for a while, but the sun will set on those in a few years too. This has me wondering about the future of 2m FM in the area.
Will it go the way of 2m AM? I’m just a bit too young to remember the Gonset Communicator or the Heath Twoer, but what happened to all that stuff? When the new (to us hams) rigs got crystalled up with ’52 and ’94 simplex, what happened to all the old stuff? Did it do continuous trips to every ham auction and fleamarket, with a different basement holding it between trips, until it faded away? We may one day be back to ’52 and ’94 simplex if we want to use analog FM.
CW fun
I was sitting in front of the rig the other day, tuning around and listening, when I heard a station calling CQ. Nice and loud, fairly quick, but the call was one of those tongue twisters that I just couldn’t get my ears around. Every time I heard it, my fingers landed on different keys on the keyboard. In frustration, I decided to light up a CW reader/keyer I had built up from a kit in the ’90s. It lit up, but none of the buttons on it worked, so the CW reader didn’t. Some days are like that. I put it on the operating (kitchen) table and opened it up. Sure enough the multimeter said the switches, instead of being normally open were now ALWAYS open. So I ripped them out, grumbling all the while about the guy who was dumb enough to put in el-cheapo switches that wouldn’t even work after just a quarter century of neglect.
Of course, I put in DIFFERENT el-cheapo switches, and the thing is, for now, working again. Since it is a week from the time I heard that station with the that call, it is another one of life’s unsolved mysteries. (insert reference to Caramilk bar here)
On a happier note, the North American QSO Party (CW version, of course) just wrapped up. Between bouts of shoving snow around, I managed a few hundred contacts, which made me happy again. It has been a while since we had a solar cycle on the upswing like this one, and I had forgotten how much fun 10m can be at times like these. Who knows, perhaps like the last time, we will see somebody come out with a 6m handheld again. Next week’s VHF contest should be fun too.
At the other end of the HF spectrum, I’m already gearing up for another of the VE2OJ 160m campaigns at the end of the month. During the daylight hours of this one, I plan to play a bit in the Winter Field Day, using our host’s VA2LGQ callsign. As mentioned above, I’m looking forward to 10m for a mess of contacts instead of the usual 20/40m grind of the past several years. Even if you don’t want to go outside and freeze your ( ), give the rest of us a contact.
One more thing
I’m sure PUE would slap my wrist if I didn’t mention the Ski Marathon, so SKI MARATHON.
73
mk
VE3FFK
Last Updated on 2024-12-23 by AdminOARC