Sunday night and last night, I happened to be tuning around on 40m and ran into stations using cheap Chinese Pixies near 7023 kHz. I worked Mike, N9MS, on Sunday night. He e-mailed me, “Tom — K9CJM — gave me his Pixie to fix. He had a couple resistors switched and the Pi-Network loading capacitor seemed to be faulty. I clipped out the capacitor and the power came right up.”
Mike was cheating a little bit. He was using a PennyWhistle amplifier, which was putting out about 15 W. Mike has produced a short video on his Pixie
Last night, I worked John, AG3N. He said that I was his first contact with the Pixie! He was running his Pixie barefoot (about 300 mW, I think) into a full-wave loop antenna, and he was S4 – S5 here in Michigan.
All this has encouraged me to get my Pixie on the air. I built the kit, but just haven’t hooked up the antenna to it yet. I gotta get this on my list of things to do. If you’re an Extra, listen for me and the other guys using Pixies down on 7023 kHz.
CQ /MI
Over the weekend, I spent an hour or so working the MDC QSO Party. As you might expect, this is a pretty small contest, so after working the stations that I could hear, I started calling CQ MDC de KB6NU/MI, hoping to attract a few MDC stations that were searching and pouncing. While I did work a few of these stations, I also got calls from stations who thought I was in MD or DC.
Wrong! If you hear someone signing with state qualifier, such as “/MI”, you should realize that they are probably not in the area of interest, but instead trying to work stations in the area of interest. Calling them is a waste of time for both you and them.
Carnation Days
Seeing as how I live in Ann Arbor, MI (home of the University of Michigan), I’m not normally an Ohio booster. I would, however, like to give a shout out to the Alliance (OH) Amateur Radio Club, who will be operating a special event station at the Greater Alliance Carnation Festival. I do like special event stations, and Frank, WA8WHP, a loyal blog reader, and a co-mentor for the Extra Elmer Net, will be one of the station operators.
Frank writes, “Next Saturday (August 15) we will be on as W8LKY, special event for Carnation Days. Alliance was the home of Mr. Lamborn, who developed the red carnation, the state flower of Ohio. I’m not sure what frequencies we will be on, but just look around. You can also contact us via our repeater, which is on Echolink 24/7, W8LKY/R.”
I suppose that you could give them a shout on the repeater , find out what frequencies they happen to be on at the time, and then try them on HF.