K9OZ ham radio blog

It's time to get the blog going again. I've had several other things going on in my life that I won't go into on this blog, and it cut into my ham radio time and pretty much stopped my blogging this year. As we start into 2012, I'll make one of my resolutions to try to blog weekly. In the past year I've added several pieces of equipment. Last spring I bought a Ten Tec Eagle just out of curiosity. I'd read the ads, and wondered if the receiver was a good as they said. My take is it does have a very nice receiver, but they worked hard at making it a simple radio, and in my opinion it is a little too simple. It has too few controls for my daily operating on cw, so I've found I'm not using it much and it will probably go onto eBay soon. My other two acquisitions this year are the Elecraft KPA 500 amplifier to round out my Elecraft K-line station and a Yaesu FT 101 E that now makes up my vintage/AM station. I'm sitting here listening to the Midw...

Sorry I've been away from blog, but I've been very active on the radio past couple months, and I just haven't kept up with blogging. In the meantime, the bands have been open, and I have to say I'm chasing more DX than I every have in my ham career. Tonight, for example, I worked Fiji, 3D2A, on 10 meters at around 9 p.m. local time with my first call. That blew me away. Then I came back down and worked Israel, 4x4FC, on 40 meters on the second call. I just don't have that kind of results with my simple ground mounted vertical. In the lst week I've worked Greenland, Guam, Jordan, Sardinia, Fiji and Israel. Most of those are new countries for me, and using the Logbook of the World system, I've been able to watch my country count steadily grow. Then while I was writing this, I managed to workd JW/F8DVD which is an expedition to Svalbard, whcih is an island in artic sea north of Norway. I managed to snag him in a lucky shot in middle of pileup. Another new one. ...