K9OZ ham radio blog

This weekend was the ARRL 160 meter contest, which is always one of my favorites. I operated for a few hours Friday night, had a couple of long runs going, and ran for a few hours in the early evening on Saturday. The result was over 600 contests, and I had a great time. Next weekend is the ARRL 10 meter contest, which is really almost the opposite as far a propogation and hours of operation goes. With the low sunspot numbers, I'm not expecting much, but I'll be on. I am learning more and more on contesting. My lesson from this one is, "If you're running a frequency and getting a high rate of hourly contacts, don't quit to go watch a football game or something. When you come back, the contest and conditions will have changed, so don't expect to pick up where you left off. I've read that advice before, but I saw it first-hand Saturday night. If I'd kept operating Saturday night, I could have added another 200 contacts or so, but I went to watch Nebraska...

I ran about an hour and a half of the NA Sprint last night -- a very fast-paced contest -- and wound up with about 60 contacts. Nothing to write home about, but I had fun. The good news is the line noise that is generated by the electrical system in this neighborhood disappeared last night, about the same time the snow melted. It had been steady s5 noise since December. It's great to hear a quiet band again. This morning I was down enjoying the quiet band, and had three great contacts. They were Joe, N4YG in Huntsvuille, AL, who I've talked to a couple times before; John, K3MD, who I've worked in many contests but never had a long contact with; and Mike, VE3GFN, in Toronto who had a new K3 and we talked K3s for a while. Good morning on the air.

With new radios, it always seems to take a while to get the software, the wiring, the station set up correctly. I've got the K3 now running throught the ICOM PW-1 amplifier, along with the 756 Pro. I've got both radios interaced withe the computer logging program, and a different computer set up as the contest station. There are still a couple bugs to work out, but I'm getting close. I tried testing things this weekend running the Texas QSO party, but propagation seemed to be against me. On both 20 and 40 meters, I could barely hear anyond from Texas this afternoon. Oh well, it's almost contest season. I'll be trying to update my contest activity more regularly as the season progresses. I'm now feeding the RSS feed of this blog to my twitter account. So if you're a twitterer, you can follow this at twitter/bplantz.

Last weekend we had 12" of rain, so it a good one to stay inside and play with the new radio. All I can say is I agree with the reviews, this is a very, very nice radio. The receiver is great, the noise blanker and noise reduction can take out my horrific line noise and it's a very nice CW rig. There isn't much more I could ask for. Here's the K3, with my K2/100 and KX1. I like Elecraft.