Here’s another card to add to my collection of QSLs from stations whose callsigns spell words:
Thanks, Bill. This is the first time that I’ve been HEXed over amateur radio.
I also recently worked a couple other relevant stations: K0OR and N2OH.
Here’s another card to add to my collection of QSLs from stations whose callsigns spell words:
I also recently worked a couple other relevant stations: K0OR and N2OH.
Yesterday, I received a couple more QSL cards from stations whose callsigns spell words—K4IN and N4PEG.
I love the K4IN card, even though he got my callsign wrong. It was very nice of him to create a card just for me. Thanks, Gerald!
On his card, Ron, N4PEG, writes,”p.s. You would have loved my old call from thirty years ago in Chicago—WD9ARM. If I had a card, I wouldl have sent it. I had contacted the WDxARM calls and arranged skeds to get their QSLs.” That’s very cool.
I got this QSL from Paul, N8XMS a couple of days ago. He says that a lot of hams interpret the XMS suffix as short for “Christmas” so he came up with this special holiday QSL card. Happy holidays, everyone!
Here are a couple of QSLs I’ve recently added to my collection of QSLs from stations whose callsigns spell words. W2TAG is a subscriber to my column. N5DO is a station I worked during the TX QSO Party.
Yesterday, a packet of QSLs arrived from ARRL QSL Bureau. I really haven’t been sending out many QSLs, and since the last couple of packets, hadn’t contained anything really exciting, I wasn’t expecting much this time. Well, I got a very pleasant surprise—two QSL cards from Antarctica.
This card is from the Royal Research Ship James Clark Ross. The card lists the ship’s location as 53S, 37W, which is about due east of the tip of South America. That’s not quite Antarctica, but the ship does travel there frequently. The card notes, “The Royal Research Ship James Clark Ross was launched on the 1st December 1990 by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and entered service with the British Antarctic Survey in September 1991.”
This card is from R1ANN, which is most definitely located on the continent of Antarctica. The QTH is the Novolazarevskaya Base of the 50th Russian Antarctic Expedition. The card lists the station location as 70’49’26”S, 11’38’46”E.
Coincidentally, I made both of these contacts on 30m CW. I find 30m CW probably the best band for making contacts such as these. At any rate, both of these QSOs were very cool indeed (pun intended).
I can’t decide whether I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to blog much or whether I’m just slowing down. It’s probably a little of each. And doing so much creates so much blog fodder that it can be overwhelming. There’s so much to write about, you can’t figure out where to start.
So, what I’m going to do here is just report quickly on a bunch of things that I’ve been doing lately. I’ll come back to some and write more about them later. Others, I won’t.
More QSLs from Stations Whose Callsigns Spell Words
Sorry to bother you again with this, but for some reason, this fascinates me. Below, you’ll see the latest three that I’ve added to my collection: K5SEE, N4SHY, and K2DOT.
I heard K7OIL on PSK the other night, but wasn’t able to work him. :(
Even more Boy Scouts This Year!
Last year, we had about 120 Boy Scouts attend the 2007 Radio Merit Badge Day. Man, that was crazy. This year was even more crazy. This year, more than 150 showed up! I got Michelle, KD8GWX, to capture some of the craziness on video, and I promise to edit that tape real soon now. Stay tuned for that.
This year, I was partnered with Mark, W8MP. Mark is a really great operator, and he’s great with kids. He convinced one guy, Paul, WA9URF, to stay on the air for more than an hour and talk to more than 40 of the Scouts. Thanks, Mark and Paul!
Thanks to all the other hams that helped out (in no particular order): Pat, W8LNO; Dave, KC8TQB; Ralph, AA8RK; Jeff, W8SGZ; George, K8GEO; Don, K0QEA; and, of course, Jack, WT8N, who really organized the whole thing (and paid for breakfast, to boot).
2008 General Class
For the past couple of months, I’ve been teaching a General Class license course. As always, this class was a lot different than the classes I’ve had in the past. For one thing, a lot of them dropped out this time. There were a dozen who started back in January, but by the end we were down to just five or six.
Life intruded for a couple of them—one student’s wife (or daughter) broke her leg, for example. For some, the material was just over their heads at this point. But, a bunch of them just quit coming. I feel kind of bad about that.
Like last year, a couple of them passed the test before the class ended. Congratulations, Arvid, KC8VGO, and Ian, N8SPE! Arvid was in my very first class five years ago, and he passed back then, but just couldn’t get the code. I’m happy that he finally got his General ticket.
One thing I did differently this time is to have a class project. Five or six of the students built the DC40A QRP transceiver. Building them has taken a bit longer than I anticipated. Even though the class is over, we’re still finishing up the kits. Even so, I think it’s been a great experience for the students.
Ham Radio at the Hands-On Museum
We’re still working on setting up a ham radio station at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum. One development is that we’re applying for a grant from the IEEE Foundation. We’ll also be applying to the ARRL Foundation.
The IEEE Foundation wants to give money to projects that promote engineering as a career. That’s our slant, anyway. We titled our project, “Kids Connect to Wireless Technology.”
That’s all for now. Gotta go rake the leaves off the lawn and fertilize.
Last week, I got a small pack of QSL cards from the bureau. Far and away, the most attractive was this one from Pertti, OH2PM, operating from Belize as V31PP:
The pack also included cards from CU2A in the Azores, a couple of HAs, HK3Q, and VE3NWA.
More callsigns that spell words (pronouns to be exact)
I’ve also added to my collection of QSLs from stations whose callsigns spell words. Most notably, I now have cards from AD5IT and K5ME. And, I have a card off to K5SEE.
Finally, WA2HOM now has its own QSL card:
It was designed by the museum’s graphic designer. I think it looks pretty good.
The weekend started out innocently enough. I had made arrangements with a guy to go over to his house and put up an antenna. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Especially when you consider that the antenna we were going to put up was a 40m dipole.
Well, we had problems right off. I had intended on using the EZ-Hang, which is basically a combination fishing reel and sling shot. The idea is that you shoot a lead weight attached to some fishing line over likely branches, then attach a rope or string, then reel it in. It is supposed to work like a charm, but I’d never used it before, and we ran into several problems.
The first problem that we had with it is that a bunch of the line had somehow gotten tangled up inside the reel and wouldn’t feed out. We tried untangling it, but after about 15 minutes, decided to just cut it off and be done with it.
After we got that working, we tied a lead sinker to the line, pointed it up into the tree, and let fly. It was a beautiful shot. The sinker sailed right over the branch we wanted it to. The only problem was that it was no longer attached to the fishing line.
After some searching, we actually managed to find the sinker. We tied it back to the fishing line, pointed, aimed, shot, and exactly the same thing happened again. Damn. We searched around, found the sinker, tied it back up, then tried another test shot. The line broke again.
At that point, we gave up on the EZ-Hang and resorted to the weighted tennis ball. Fortunately, my friend has a better arm than I do, and with only a few practice throws, we were able to get a line over a branch about 30 feet up. We duplicated this feat on another tree about 70 feet away. We now had ropes over branches, but we had consumed about half the time available for this task.
We then proceeded to build the antenna. That went pretty smoothly until we started attaching PL-259s to the coax. My friend did not have a vice to securely hold the connectors while we applied the solder, so after a botched attempt, we decided to drive over to my house to do this. We got one PL-259 on, but then basically ran out of time.
My friend had to get going, so we called it quits. After four hours, we were still only about half done with the antenna project. Chalk it up to Murphy’s Law in action.
RTFM
That evening, still miffed that we didn’t get the EZ-Hang to work, I searched through my file cabinet for the documentation that came with the EZ-Hang. This is, of course, what I should have done before we tried using it.
What the instructions said was to tie the sinker to the line using a Palomar Knot. The Palomar Knot uses a double thickness of line, which should make a much stronger knot. From what I’ve read on the ‘Net, it’s a very common fishing know. Not being a fisherman, though, I had never heard of it before.
At Least I Can Still Operate
Something did go right for me Saturday. My first contact was VK6HCI on 30m. I then QSY’d to 40 and worked FM5LD. My last QSO of the day was a PA station, and we had a nice ragchew. I also worked a couple of stations doing the PA QSO Party.
On Sunday, I worked a few more stations in the PA QP, including N3BUD and W3SO, adding to my collection of stations whose callsigns spell words. Somewhere in there, I also worked WB4DAD, making it three new QSLs to add to my collection. So, while I did feel kinda bad about the antenna fiasco, the DX and new QSLs for my collection helped me get over it. :)
BoingBoing has an item on CB QSL cards, citing them as an example of “folk art.” I must admit that some of them are kind of interesting. Every once in a while, I’ll get a ham QSL card that looks like these, but they’re rare. I wonder what percentage of CB cards were homemade?
GNOSIS, the nickname of one of the respondents, points to the K8CX QSL Card Gallery, which has many interesting and unique amateur radio QSL cards.
While we’re on the subject of QSL cards, doesn’t it seem that nearly all of the QSL cards you get from European stations have a cathedral or castle or some similarly grand—and very old—structure? Unfortunately, we’re disadvantaged in that respect here in the U.S. Unless you happen to live in New York City, or maybe Boston, most of the really old bulidings are not very awe-inspiring.
So, what’s a ham to do? Well, in thinking about this with regard to my QTH, I asked myself, “What’s the closest thing we have to a cathedral here in Ann Arbor”? My answer, Michignan Stadium! Every fall, more than 100,000 acolytes come to worship there on selected Saturdays. With a capacity of 107,501, it is the biggest American football stadium in the world.
So, here’s a draft of my new QSL card:
To be honest, I’m not even that big of a football fan, but it is an impressive structure, with or without fans.