2025 Blog Archive

Rain this morning, but right on the verge of snow. It’s 35F now and has been raining for several hours. It got up to 40F yesterday with sunshine which took it’s toll on the accumulated snow here. I had some hope that once the rain started to fall the rest...

Awoke to generally poor band conditions which makes LoTW being down less of an irritation. My local DX cluster is down again too. Plus, I worked a DX station who correctly pointed out that we had worked previously, a few years earlier, and he didn’t appreciate dupes in his...

The good news this morning was that when I tested my local DX cluster, it was back online following a couple weeks of downtime. Given it resides at Purdue University, the timing was right for it to have gone down while the students were on winter break and wasn’t recovered...

I use Jekyll to manage my blog content. It’s been around a long time and is stable. It’s also highly configurable providing me with plenty of options. I selected it as my CMS because Wordpress and Blogger had become worn as an old toothbrush. Plus, everyone tends to use the...

Circumlocution seems the order of the day when it comes to bad-mouthing ARRL. Or more correctly, the ARRL Board of Directors. I have a solution that will go a long way toward fixing it. Never vote for an incumbent. Always vote for someone who is not currently a Director. You...

A fellow on one of the QRP mailing lists was asking if anyone had a TR-45L CW transceiver they would like to part with. This due to the fact that John, WA3RNC went QRT on radio production last year when he retired. You can’t buy them new from...

Last night, hours after local sundown, I decided to try to work a few stations in the NAQP. The juice had already drained from 20 meters and signals were right down in the noise. Slow-tuning, I heard an interesting call, just barely above the noise. You know how it...

While I made no specific resolutions for this New Year, I have made a few decisions that sure look like resolutions given their timing. For example, I’m quitting on a lot of memberships and subscriptions in the coming year. Been meaning to do that since I retired but haven’t been...

I’ve had a Bluesky account since the service launched. I’ve been loathe to mention it here because having fled Twitter a few years ago, I really haven’t wanted much to do with social media. Creating a Bluesky presence was more “let’s see what this is like” than a commitment...

Good morning. Here in the US, it’s a National Day of Mourning for Jimmy Carter, the first former president to live to 100. That means things won’t fully operate as normal today, and flags will fly at half-staff for the next 30 days. NCDXF is pleased to announce...

Band conditions haven’t been great the last few days and my DX production has suffered because of it. Not helping is that my favorite DX cluster went down over the weekend, not a fatal problem, but another brick in the wall. I had things setup smooth as a perfect self-checkout...

People keep saying the ARRL needs to do something to goose up it’s membership numbers. Problem is, few have good ideas for how they should do that, although from what I read most suggest that they throw open the floodgates in Newington and give everything away for free....

I refilled the bird feeders Saturday and enjoyed watching the little creatures eat their fill. My ham shack is located in a sun room addition to the house that protrudes into the backyard making it a perfect spot for me to keep tabs on the birds and the squirrels who...

Woke to 10F with clear skies this morning. The temperature in the shack had fallen to 45F, the coolest I’ve seen it in here. I fired up the heater before starting the first pot of coffee and things have warmed up to 60F in here now. Not a bad start...

I got my first scare of the K4 era yesterday when I noted a sudden high SWR on ten meters. I checked the antenna and found no issue there, I even setup the IC-7610 on 10m with the same antenna without seeing a problem. I assumed something was fried and...

Well I’m not the kind to live in the past, The years run too short and the days too fast, The things you lean on are the things that don’t last, Well it’s just now and then my line gets cast into these, Time passages… Living in Central Indiana, I’ve...

Happy New Year! Survive until ‘25 was a popular mantra. Now what? The 2024 blog posts have been archived and the new files for 2025 have been spun up. I’m writing this with a few hours remaining in ‘24 so the numbers aren’t quite precise, but the stats at the...