It was a year ago today that Elon Musk bought Twitter, ruining the service and the brand. At least that’s my view of how things went down. Having been an early adopter and frequent advocate for Twitter as a tool for radio amateurs, I deleted my account some months later and haven’t really looked back. As it turns out, I still have another account. Something I created a few years after my ham radio call sign account. I have re-visited the social network a few times using that other account, but it’s not the same and I don’t really use it. So much water under the bridge that makes me wonder, do hams still use Twitter?
I had this Early Shift Hunter award in my POTA account this morning. It says it’s for “Making 100 QSOs as a hunter during the Early Shift” which isn’t too surprising considering I’m frequently on the air before the sun comes up, but there was nothing to inform me what time the early shift begins and ends?
The W3LPL Propagation Report was prefaced with this today:
“Despite very unusual low sunspot and geomagnetic activity for solar maximum, some of the best HF propagation in 20 years is likely to continue through at least Saturday October 28th by Frank Donovan, W3LPL”
That might be good news for the crowd expected to participate this weekend in the SSB edition of the 2023 CQ World-Wide DX Contest. Or as this week’s editor of the ARRL Contest Update N1ADG wrote, “With propagation on the higher frequencies being some of the best we’ve seen in decades, 10 and 15 meters will be a great place to find multipliers and run, run, run.”
Yeah. Do that!
I usually don’t get out and get on the air that early, but I was aware of the early shift awards. From what I know, it is completely based on the activator and not what time it is where the hunter is.
From the POTA docs:
Early Shift is the 6-hour period beginning at 02:00 UTC, +/- 1 hour for each 15 degrees of longitude that the park pin is offset from 0 degrees.
On another site, I found this:
This generally works out to approximately 2am – 8am local time, but observance of time zones and daylight savings will make the exact local time vary from location to location.
At any rate, congrats on the wallpaper and I’m sure those early activators really appreciate your being on in the mornings to help them complete their activations.
Thanks for the heads up on that Nick. Larry, W2LJ had also dropped a note to say that if you click the link to the park the listing shows the early and late times – which is handy and I never had noticed that before!
73, Jeff