I jumped into the Spartan Sprint last night with high hopes. I was using the IC-7610 at five watts into the old CHA MPAS Lite antenna mounted vertically on the ground and with one 31-foot radial. There was much confusion (on my part) about the event start time having just changed the clocks over the weekend. Not hearing a single soul I gave up for an hour and went back to watching the Indiana Pacers game. They won, by the way, 152-111 over the Spurs, tying their own record for points scored in a half and a game. It was an entertaining three-point shooting contest.
Back in the shack a little later, I finally heard a few stations calling “CQ SP” but conditions on 40 meters weren’t good and 20 meters was dead to me. I ended up working three stations though it felt like cheating. Two of them were less than ten miles from me! I did work John, K4BAI down in Georgia, who always sports a big signal. And that was it. Three contacts using a “tubby” transmitter. I need to send my report and soapbox to Richard, KI6SN and hope for better luck in the December Spartan Sprint.
My new KH1 could be arriving soon. I ordered it online the same day it was announced at Pacificon (October 20th) and according to the shipping status information on the Elecraft web site orders placed that day are expected to ship in 4-6 weeks so I should be advancing in the queue. I’ve kept an eye on the mailing list that discusses that new hardware and Wayne, N6KR recently posted that the internal logging feature with date/time/freq/mode stamps in a human-readable text format using 32k of onboard memory will be ready by December. My understanding of this feature is that you take it to field, make contacts, then come home and download the file which can be read by a human and then typed into the main station log. If that works well then field logging will become an historical artifact for me…
New (to me) blogs of note. I recently worked W6CSN while he was activating K-7889 Presidio of SF National Historic Site. I looked him up on QRZ and noticed the link to his blog. It’s in the feed reader now. And there’s Copasetic Flow, another new addition to my feed reader. And while not new, the QRP world rejoices whenever Jim, W1PID posts photos and applesauce about his latest outdoor adventure. The pictures are worth at least a thousand words, probably more.