K9OZ ham radio blog

Took the Mini to Minis on the Dragon last weekend. Not much radio time, but did meet two other hams at the event. There were over 600 Mini Coopers there, by the way. Here's a nice shot of the car and antenna. I'm thinking of heading to Dayton next weekend. Not much radio time with all this travel.

I spent most of Saturday getting the Icom IC 7000 installed in the Mini Cooper. It was a trick, but it's in and seems to be working fine. I'm running the Yaesu ATAS 120A antenna, and have a gizmo on order that will allow me to tune the antenna manually. For right now, it's tuned to 40 meter cw and that's where it will be this week. I had picked up a neat little paddle at Dayton a couple years ago, and hadn't had a chance to really use it. I screwed it to the top of the Cooper's ashtray, and it should work great there. The position is perfect. I'd like to have the control head higher -- closer to line of sight, but for right now its sitting next to the shift lever. Not great, but doable. If you really want to mess with the radio, pull off the road.

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...