California QSO party 2024

 The contest club I'm a member of has one contest a season which is a wild card. This year it's the California QSO party which starts on October 5th at 1600 UTC and ends October 6th at 2200 UTC. I participated the first day for about 2 hours before family showed up at our house and of course it was time to end for the day. Bands were doing very well so it was tuff to quit but I had Sunday yet to contest.

  The next day I was back on the air on 20m but not too early-1247 UTC although on the West coast it was still dark. This entire contest I was on 20,15 and 10 meters only. I never heard much activity on the lower bands, so I stayed were the action seemed to be. My favorite band is 10m mainly because it's the only HF band where I have aluminum in the air-my other antennas for Hf are an inverted L and a ground mounted vertical. The 10m Yagi performed well enough I had at least two contacts mention my great signal and nice sounding station!!

  I only managed 71 contacts for 5,112 points on SSB voice. If I was a CW guy my score would be double!! Oh well. Fun contest and the participants were very cordial. Might have to remember this one for next year!

73--Tim

CQ WW RTTY 2024

   I decided to try and double my score from last year's RTTY contest so Friday night I started at the opening and had some good success for about 2 hours. Both of my antennas for 75m are not great with narrow bandwidth for the RTTY frequencies but with the inline VCI tuner I managed to make a few contacts. The rest of the weekend I stayed on 40m and above so the Butternut HF6V ground mounted vertical and 10m yagi were used and they both perform well on the higher bands. 

The bands on 15 and 10m meters had fair openings both days and 20 and 40m seemed to have less activity because of that. I still did my usual start high and work low toward sunset so I was able to spread out the contacts between the bands. It was fun having contacts from around the world and I'm hoping to add a few new DXCC's to my total count. We will check LOTW soon and see ! 

  I was hoping for 200 contacts and when I reached 201 on late Sunday afternoon I decided that was enough and submitted my log with over 75000 points. I do expect that amount to drop since several stations kept dropping my second "J" on my call sign even after I sent it many times to correct them. Oh well such is the challenge of contesting!

 73---Tim

 

Las Vegas trip in August

 We went on vacation to Las Vegas before my wife goes back to work in September. Its maybe a little unusual to go during the summer when the temperatures are touching 110F, but it's a dry heat is what we tell ourselves. The mornings we enjoyed spending time at the pool and afternoon we did a little gambling and exploring. We never were close to our prearranged gambling limits so that was good. One evening we went to a Carrie Underwood show at Resorts World theatre which was fun. It's always interesting to check out other hotel/casinos for future trips. Summer is winding down so that's sad but we had fun and also managed to finish a few projects.

73---Tim

Shack clean up

 

After removing the old dipole antenna, I realized I had several old antennas fed thru coax switches and manual tuners. I also still had the ladder line strung through the shack that needed to be removed. The shack coax jumpers,two tuners and associated connections were complicated enough I had drawn a diagram so I would remember what I had connected through the years.

   I decided I was able to remove three old antenna connections plus the ladder line and consolidate the the rest on just one tuner and remove three coax switches plus coax jumpers. The shack looks much cleaner and easier to operate.

73--Tim

End of the Dipole

My 260' dipole I've had up in the air for about 30 years broke and was laying on the ground when I caught this bear passing by the house. He is one of many we've seen in our yard this year although usually the ladder line is about ten feet above any wildlife. When this antenna was first installed, I was young enough to climb the big pine tree to attach a rope to a garage spring and the insulating "T" for the dipole legs. This antenna was built by my Ham Radio Elmer Roger who gently nudged Me into the hobby with antenna and radio help. This antenna has performed over the years quite well and only parts have failed over the years.

The pine tree this is attached to has grown and surrounding woods has filled in to the point its actually difficult to get access and see where the failure occurred although after some brushing and chain sawing, I found the rope attached to the spring had broken. I cut enough lower dead branches to use a ladder to try to reattach the spring but as I was doing thing one leg of the dipole broke also. After i examined the break, I realized the wire was very old and becoming brittle. Not surprising with the age of this antenna.

I pondered this for a while and decided maybe it was time to retire this antenna not only because of its age but my age too. Probably not the best idea at My age to be climbing trees anyway. I still have a working inverted "L" that is not as old and seems to be working the low bands fairly well so time to retire the dipole---it served Me well for many years!!

73-Tim