K9OZ ham radio blog

I made it to the Dayton Hamvention and back last weekend. The highlight for me was the contest forum on Saturday morning. I just stumbled into it, but had a great time and learned some things. I seemed more at homewith the contesters than most of the groups I was involved with at Dayton. Most contesters are CW ops, that's part of it. My big Dayton purchase was a Stationmaster controller from Microham. It's purpose is to interface between the K3 and the PW-1 amp. I got it up and running, but it's been buggy so far, and seems to go into error mode every now and then. I'll keep messing with it, but so far I'm regretting my purchase. It added a lot of complextity to the station, just so I wouldn't have to push a button on the amp and the SteppIR vertical controller when I changed bands. I saw that at good insurance for the amp, but so far, I'm not sold. More on that later.

I'll be in Dayton one week from tonight. Any followers or tweeters going to be there. Let's do a meet-up.

This weekend I was able to run two large QSO parties at the same time -- the New England QSO party which covers the New England states, and the 7th Area QSO party, with all the 7th call district -- Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. I had tried doing it in the past, but found logging a probem. You really need two separate log programs open. With the new setup with the K3 and LPBridge, I'm able to run two logging programs at once. Saturday night I was running the 7QSO party on WinEQF and the NEQSO party on N1MM logger. Both were up on the screen, so switching between the two was simple. I don't have exact numbers, but I did around 70 contacts in the 7QP and 40 in NEQP. I just didn't hear enough New England stations. On another note, I got my 80-meter dipole back up in the top of a tree where it belongs. It's now at 40 feet, rather than sloping from 40 to 10 feet.