A busy weekend at KB6NU

This last weekend was a very busy on here at KB6NU. I attended the QSO Today Virtual Expo, chatted with some local ham friends on Zoom, and worked three state QSO parties.

On Friday night, I checked into the QSO Today Virtual Ham Expo. There wasn’t a lot going on, but I sat in on the live streaming of the Ham Radio Workbench and Ham Radio 2.0 podcasts and wandered around the booths a bit. As you might expect, there weren’t many people in the booths. The busiest one that I dropped in on was the CWops booth. I think there were four or five of us in there.

On Saturday morning, before the Virtual Expo got started, I dropped into a Zoom meeting that takes place every Saturday morning. Before the pandemic, this meeting used to take place at a local bagel shop, but now we do it online. For some reason, it’s called “The Clinic.” The Clinic got started when some guys would join Dik, KC8UXT, at his favorite breakfast spot, Barry Bagels, every Saturday morning.

Sadly, Dik is now an SK, but the Clinic continues. We get started about 9 am Eastern time and BS about ham radio for a couple until about 11 am.  Feel free to drop in and join the Zoom meeting.

This Saturday, I left the Clinic at 10 am to make some contacts in the Oklahoma QSO Party, the first of three state QSO parties over the weekend. By the time I got set up it was 10:15, and over the next half hour, I managed to make five QSOs. That was enough to qualify my participation for the State QSO Party Challenge.

At 11 am, it was back to the Virtual Expo. Over the next 5-6 hours, I attended presentations and did some booth duty in both the ICQPodcast booth. I say booth duty, but it was really just chatting with the ICQPodcast guys and the occasional listener.

As you may have heard, there were some software problems with the Virtual Expo. Some attendees had problems with their login credentials and some of the sessions didn’t work quite right. The sessions on ionospheric propagation and machine learning were two that I wanted to attend, but unfortunately, they never started.

Several sessions did work correctly, though, including the session on amateur radio branding. That session was moderated by Martin, M1MRB, of the ICQPodcast, and was quite a good discussion. Fortunately, all of the presentations were pre-recorded and will be available to attendees for the next 30 days on Virtual Expo website. After that, they’ll be uploaded to the Virtual Expo YouTube channel.

After eating some dinner, it was back to the shack, to make some contacts in the Idaho QSO Party. After making a couple of contacts on 40m, I switched to 80m and made a third one. Since I don’t do very well to the west, I figured that was enough, and shut down the station for the day.

More troubles on Sunday

At 11 am Sunday morning, it was back to the Virtual Expo. Unfortunately, the Expo’s software woes continued. I think that what happened in the session that I was “hosting” was a great example of how things went wrong.

I’m not sure exactly why the organizers did this, but they decided to tack on a title screen to each video and run that screen along with some elevator music for three minutes. That got old pretty fast, so the speaker and I decided to start the video before making the session go live, then making the session live after it had run for two minutes. Bad move. When we did make the session live, no one could see the video. Stopping and re-starting the video did not work.

Someone in the audience suggested ending the session and restarting it. That sounded good, but I didn’t have a good feeling about this. One of the sessions that I had wanted to attend on Saturday had ended prematurely, and I was guessing they had a similar problem with their video and tried the same maneuver. That session never took place. I said as much, but the speaker wanted to try it so we did. Of course, we couldn’t get the session re-started after doing that.

The speaker had a link to the online support, so we tried that. I was going to say that these guys were pretty clueless, but would be unfair. They were being asked to support a system that was poorly designed and had lots of bugs. They did the best they could, but they just really couldn’t do much. After about a half hour, they decided just to add a session with the same title. A little more than 35 minutes after the session was to start, we were able to start the second version of the session. The rest pretty much went off without a hitch.

EXCEPT, my presentation on teaching online classes was to start an hour after this session that I was hosting. Since the session started late, I told the speaker that I was going to have to cut out early and head over to my session. WRONG! A host could not leave a session that he or she was hosting until the session ended. Nor, could the support people transfer the host status from me to the speaker. I even tried quitting the browser and then signing in to the Virtual Expo again. As soon as I signed in, the software put me in the session that I was hosting. ARRRGGGGHH.

Fortunately, I had the phone number for the host of my session. I phoned him and told him to start the video, and I would join the session as soon as I could. Fortunately, there were not many questions in the first session, and as soon as I ended the session, the software transferred to my session, where the video was just finishing up. So, I was able to field questions there. All’s well that ends well, I guess. :)

After giving my presentation, I hung out in the ICQPodcast booth for a while, but I had one more QSO party to work this weekend: the Wisconsin QSO Party. Over the next hour and a half, I logged nearly 50 QSOs for a score of just over 3,000 points.

At that point, I’d had plenty of ham radio over the weekend. My wife had been itching to wash our car, so we hopped in and went to one of those wash-it-yourself places. After getting the car looking like new (well, almost like new), we got some takeout and had a nice dinner. All in all, it was a great weekend!