The weather is downright lovely here today. 62F at sunrise with lower humidity. I have a lot of lawn mowing to catch up on this morning then I intend to play for a few hours this afternoon in the NJQRP Skeeter Hunt. I’ll have the IC-705 on the back porch with the CHA-MPAS Lite antenna in the backyard. Look for me on 20 meters, I’ll be Skeeter #187.

Still no appreciable antenna work completed at the new QTH, but lots of mental gymnastics has helped forge a plan of action. I intend to install a random wire at 30-feet to use with the AH-4 auto-tuner along with the R6000 vertical. It’s as plain vanilla as it gets, but this will have to do until next Spring when something more akin to a real antenna farm can be planted.

Cycle 25 looks to be quickly working its way to a frothy peak of activity and I don’t want to miss whatever might be left. Besides, I’ve had very good luck with a random wire and the AH-4 tuner when using a decent ground system and I’ll be surprised if this arrangement disappoints.

I haven’t worked a new country since April. Up to that point I was doing pretty well in the DX Marathon quest having logged 76 unique entities with only 346 total contacts this year. Then the bottom fell out of life and radio was interrupted. Now life is beginning to get back to normal though I have lowered my expectations for the Marathon. I’ll just be happy to resume the chase and hit at least the hundred mark this year. Last year I logged 123 unique entities over the course of just half the year so this seems doable.