The conference Hackers on Planet Earth takes place this weekend in New York City. It looks like a lot of fun.
There will be a ham station there, using the callsign N2H. According to the Make: magazine blog, they will be operating on:
- 28.370 MHz,
- 14.270 MHz,
- 7.260 MHz, and
- 3.885 MHz
Apparently, there are no CW hackers in the bunch. (I’ll have to try to figure out how to change that.
Here’s the cool QSL card designed specifically for N2H:
Matt/W1MSW says
The card is awesome and I’ve been spreading the word. Have you heard anything yet? I dialed around a little bit this last night and this morning and checked some spotter networks but haven’t seen or heard anything yet. Thanks for posting and good luck!
Dan KB6NU says
I tried working them yesterday for a while, but didn’t hear them on either 40m or 20m. I’m still trying, though.
Matt/W1MSW says
Well I spent WAY too much time chasing searching for N2H over the weekend and I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that they weren’t operating much HF. According to the The Next Hope Wiki , it’s possible that the special event station was going to be primarily geared towards attendees contacting the station via HTs at the convention (See “QSL Cards”). It’s also entirely possible that they were pointed due west and I, up in western MA, might have been smack dab in a null in their ant. I only saw them spotted twice on HF Freqs. Once on Friday on 40m Phone and once today on 20m psk31. Not all was lost though. Some some good things did come out of spending too much time in the shack this weekend: Spent much needed time figuring out LOTW, worked some CW DX (prop on 20m was great), spent time attempting to improve CW speed and accuracy and registered for an account with DXSummit and learned how to configure it to send me an email when a spot comes up that I’m interested in. Very useful if you’re trying to multitask and really want a QSO with a station like N2H (if they get spotted). Dan, I hope you had better success at getting the card than me! 73.
Dan KB6NU says
Unfortunately, I didn’t work them. I missed them on Friday, and just never got on the air Saturday or Sunday. Today, I spent most of the day outside “de-junglizing” my backyard.
I had to take down my antennas so that I could have a tree service come and cut down a couple of elm trees that finally bit the dust. In doing so, I cut a path through the undergrowth to the tree that serves as the far end support for my 40m dipole, but it was only a path. Today, I spent almost five hours hacking through the rest of the brush and bundling it up so that our recyclers would pick it up.
After that I was too tired to fool around with the antenna. Oh well, maybe next year. And who knows, maybe next year, I’ll even make the hike to NYC to actually operate the station. HOPE looked like a lot of fun.
KC5CW says
I operated N2H. I made the station’s first QSO, on 40 phone, but after that all opns switched to 20m PSK31 & CW with FT-817. We made a number of nice DX contacts that duly impressed observers, all of whom were techies but many had not seen an amateur station before.
The conference was a blast. Attendees were issued RFID badges; you could track people on large displays as they moved around the area. Cold solder joints in the battery clip, however, affected many of the badges. There was a vast amount of kit building going on.
I kind of wished I’d joined the N2H antenna crew on the hotel roof, overlooking Mad Garden! But it was extremely windy that day and likely hazardous to be up there.
The ham exams were well attended. I came back with something Extra…
Dan KB6NU says
Thanks for the report. Chances are I would not have been able to contact you on 20m at all. It sounds like the conference was a lot of fun, though.
Joe NE2Z says
You did not miss much on the roof. A few hours of trying to get the feedlines down blindly in 94 degree humid weather.
I brought the PSK31 setup which included FT-817, Nomic interface, Dell D610 running Ubuntu 10.04 with FLdigi software. I brought a CW key in case people wanted a demo