K9OZ ham radio blog

 I just returned from a month-long road trip west that included 17 summits in Black Hills and Wyoming.  That brings me to 1,154 points, 168 activations of 95 unique summits activated,  When you do that many summits in a short time, they start to run together.  So I'll run through my log and photo album with some notes on each summit.  I'm going to start with my second-to-the last summit, Red Mountain W7Y/SW-022.  This was the high point of my trip, hiking up to the summit at 10,500 feet.  That's the highest altitude I had hiked to, and cam almost three weeks into the trip.  Living at 500 feet, it's safe to say I'm not used to high altitude.  A few years ago the wife and I spent a day hiking in the Medicine Bow Mountains at 9,000 feet just a few days after leaving home.  That got me a mild case of altitude sickness, and reminder that you can't just to to high altitude and hike.  So this year I started by spending 10 days in the Black...

For years my goal has been to complete a clean sweep in the CW ARRL Sweepstakes. A clean sweep is working all 80 sections in the US and Canada, which includes Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Several years I've been close with 78 or 79 sections, but I never managed to get the Northwest Territory in Canada. This year I was fighting high line noise, and wondered whether to even take part. But I started out and started getting some of the rare sections -- North Dakota, Wyoming, South Dakota -- right off, so I got hooked. The contest started at 4 p.m. local time, and by the time I went to bed at 1 a.m. I was close to 400 contacts and had 76 sections. I was missing Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Newfoundland and Northwest Territory. So I thought I had a real chance for the sweep. On Sunday, I started out with a good run on 40 meters, and after it got light moved to 20 and 15 to look for my three missing multipliers. I didn't spend full time at the radio, just checking the s...

Last weekend was the CW Sweepstakes, probably the biggest and most challenging of North American contests. I had planned on making a major effort to work a clean sweep -- all 80 sections -- but discovered I had an old friend and his wife visiting over the weekend. It was hard to tell them "No, don't come, I have a ham radio contest." So instead I did a very modest effort -- in about 2.5 hours of operating I made roughly 140 contacts. I had a good run going on 40 meters Sunday morning, and did some search and pounce just to listen around the bands. Actually, it was a little liberating not to have to try to beat last year's score and make that clean sweep. Maybe next year. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other contests coming up this winter. Maybe I'll make a big effort on the 160 meter contest next month. Phone Sweepstakes is two weeks away, and I'll dabble in that a little, but I just don't see the challenge of working a phone contest. Maybe if I had a bett...

It's Saturday morning and Sweepstakes, the biggest and toughest contest, starts this afternoon. It's tough because the exchange is long and unpredictable. People complain about contensts having a meaningless 599 exchange, but Sweepstakes is just the opposite. I'll be sending a serial number, precednece or the classification I'm in, my call, the check which is the year I was first licensed, and my section -- 1 U K9OZ 65 IL. That may not seem like much, but copy different variations from different stations a few hundred times at high speed CW and you start to see the problem. I ususally set a goal for myself prior to the contest. Last year my goal was 400 contacts and a clean sweep -- working all the sections. I wound up with 380 and 75 sections. Someday, I'd like to do the clean sweep, but most years I wind up in the 75 to 78 range. There are a few tough ones, like the Northwest Territories in Canada. So my goal this year is 500 and a clean sweep. I'll report bac...

After what seems weeks (okay 2 weeks) of swearing at the computer, I have the station fully set up and ready to run for the contest season. In this screen shot you can see LP-Pan giving me a visual display of the band, CW Skimmer decoding a signal, and N1MM logger running. I had most of this running on an old XP computer two weeks ago, but I was at 100 percent processor capacity. So thinking it would be too much work to upgrade to a bigger processor on that machine, I bought a basic new gaming computer with Vista, a high-powered processor and lots of RAM. That made sense to me. I could get the machine for $500 or so, move the sound card and extra port cards from the other machine and be ready to run. If Vista was a problem, I could downgrade to XP. I waw wrong on every assumption. The sound card I had -- an M-Audio Audiophile 2486 -- has no Vista drivers and it was a bear to get the Power SDR software to run on Vista, so I decided to downgrade the computer to XP. It didn't want to ...