In case you hadn’t noticed, I gave myself a few days off this week. Hope you found the random links posted on Wednesday and Thursday of some interest…

Don’t be fooled by today’s post title, I have nothing to sell you.

But it is Black Friday and things are quiet around here this morning. My wife works in retail and had to go to work at 5am this morning so it was just me and the dog and cat. I quickly became bored and headed outside. Not to shop, but to get some coffee and write a few words. It’s currently 44F with cloudy skies here. According to the weatherman clear skies and 53F will eventually replace this gloom.

I’ve no great deals to recommend though I have noticed a lot of ham radio vendors are playing that game so take a look around, maybe you need something and don’t even know it?

Odds and Ends

Hopefully you have had better luck than me working the 5R8 team? I’ve spent several hours neck deep in big pileups on 30 meters trying to get in their log with no luck. They have had surprisingly strong signals here especially given their location, but I can’t seem to reciprocate. Who says FT8 is too easy?

I deleted my Mastodon account yesterday. Have you ever spent 30 minutes among real open source zealots? If you haven’t then I can’t adequately describe it. If you have, then I’m certain it felt more like hours, or days. Open source zealots are annoying and most of them misfits. While a chunk of hams made the move there from Twitter, I predict many will be disappointed in a land flowing with the descendants of Berkley hippies. YMMV.

This weekend is the CQ Worldwide DX CW Contest and what I hope will be a big finish to what has been a good year of DX for me.

It kicks off on Saturday, beginning at 00Z and running for 48 hours, the biggest CW/Morse code operating event of the year, with plenty of opportunities to work new ones or just have fun. The bands are going to be crowded with a lot of CW activity so feel free to hideout on the WARC bands if such a thing upsets you.

Here are the complete rules and a list of stations expected to be active this weekend. Good luck!