Ham Stuff

The amazing amount of comment spam

I’ve started to think about turning off commenting. Even with RECAPTCHA, I am getting tons of WordPress comment spam. For example, while I’ve been writing this paragraph, 5 more spam comments came in. For the sake of recording 117 legitimate comments, I’ve had to filter out 7,783 spam comments. A pretty poor signal to noise ratio.

If I decide to turn off commenting, amateur radio operators can find my email address from my call sign using any of the normal means. I may also try activating a second level of spam protection. It’s sad that i has to come to this.

Back to CM97fn for JOTA 2012

I am going back to the Boy Scouts of America’s Rancho Los Mochos this year. I’ll be on VHF and HF on Saturday October 20 trying to make contacts around the country and globe.

Working on contest scoring software

Recently, I have been working with a team from the Northern California Contest Club to write software to score and report the results from the California QSO Party (CQP). This has been chewing up all my programming time, so I haven’t had time to make improvements to the azimuthal map program. I hope to get back to it again after the contest scoring software is done. Thanks for the suggestions.

New number formatting

Special thanks to Bart, SQ1K, for a suggestion about a better way to format the numbers around the circle. I’ve implemented the new formatting, and it’s deployed to the site.

Point your antennas at CM97fn for JOTA 2011

This year, I am pleased to announce that I will be activating the Boy Scouts of America’s Rancho Los Mochos during the annual, international Jamboree On The Air on October 15, 2011. With the help of KF6H and perhaps others, we will be putting Webelos and Boy Scouts on the air from 9am-5pm Pacific Daylight Time.

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Worked last QSO for ARRL Triple Play!

Tonight, I completed the 150th QSO for the ARRL’s Triple Play Award. I started thinking the award was a possibility last November when I worked 40 ARRL sections by CW during the ARRL November Sweepstakes. It has been my primary ham radio goal for the past 3 or 4 months.

The last QSO to complete the award was with Ted, KN5O, in Louisiana by CW. A Bay Area ham, John (KI6BEN), recommended Ted for a QSO, and I set up a sked with him via email. Conditions on 20m weren’t all that great. His RST was a 569, and mine was 559. He had it uploaded before I did. Thanks Ted!

10 new entities from CQ WPX SSB

15m was the money band for the CQ WPX SSB contest. I got ten new entities.

Antigua & Barbuda
Belgium
Croatia
Czech Republic
England
Fiji
Ireland
Italy
Slovak Republic
Switzerland

I wish I had more time to operate.

ARRL 2010 Sweepstakes results

I got 116 CW QSOs with 49 sections for a total of 11,368 points and 325 SSB QSOs with 68 sections for 44,200 points. We had terrible weather Saturday night. We had heavy rain with lightning in the area. I powered down for an hour or so because the noise level was so high, and there was the threat of lightning.

Worked ZL8X!

I worked ZL8X before having to send my Yaesu FT-450AT to Yaesu for service. When I tried working them barefoot, no reply. Turned on the borrowed linear, and ZL8X replied on the first call. Now I am sending in my rig to get the CW plug fixed.

FT-450 on steroids for ARRL Sweepstakes

Thanks to N6WM, I will be using a linear amplifier for the ARRL Sweepstakes this weekend. I also have a new 80m inverted-L antenna and better elevation for my fan dipole.

FT-450 on Steriods