K9OZ ham radio blog

I've been remiss in keeping the blog up, but the month of July isn't a great one for Ham radio. Too much band noise from thunderstorms, too little time, and too many other things to do. The only exception for that was the IARU contest a couple weekends ago. This is a short, simple contest, with a very simple, fast exchange. I went downstairs Saturday night, and managed to rack up neary 400 contacts. I acheived a high QSO rate running a frequency for a couple hours. That got my contesting juices flowing, and I'm looking forward to next fall's contest season. More on that as we get closer. I have other interests and hobbies, one of which is cars. My daily commuter car is a 2007 Mini Cooper, and as a friend told me "Minis aren't a car, they are a cult." I participated in the cult this weekend at an event titled Mini Takes The States. It was a Mini rally, with several hundred Mini Coopers at the Road America race track in Elkhorn Lake, WI, about 150 miles nort...

Well, I made it to Nebraska to operate Field Day with my cousin Brad, KG0GY. Despite breaking both of our antenna supports, we managed to get low antennas on 20 and 40 meters and make about 370 contacts -- 368 of them on CW. We both learned a good lesson -- you can't have too many antenna plans for Field Day. When the first support broke, we joked about going to Plan B. By Saturday afternoon we were on Plan D, but luckily, that one held up. Next year, we'll do more antenna preparation. For me, it was a kick to operate from Nebraska, and send NE as the section. It had been 30 years or so since I had done that. The photo above is Brad, hard at work. We ran my K2/100 and his Icom 746Pro.