Sunday afternoon it got up into the mid-40sF and was bright and sunny. It’s the kind of sunlight that warms a person who is sitting in it. One might even be able to ditch the coat for a little while, if the breeze doesn’t pick up too much. Looking outside to The Big Blue Room,…
Month: February 2023
Freeze Your Acorns Off 2023 – Results!
Well, the results are in and Team KC8JC, made up of yours truly and my Dad, AC8NT came in third place. Now that’s not too shabby given that we went QRT about an hour or so before the contest ended. It’s also not so bad when we consider that our team did not enter the…
Fighting Off The Geese
Right after I finished posting my last entry, I learned that my family was essentially going off in different directions. It was sunny out and the temperatures were in the mid-to-upper 40sF and there was only a touch of wind. Why not grab another activation? Why not, indeed! My gear was still packed up and…
More. Missing. Pavilions.
With a long holiday weekend, I thought I would get to the park more than I did. The weather was not at all interested in cooperating. It was sitting in the 20s with some significant wind on Friday and Saturday. But when Sunday rolled around, the temperatures hit the mid-40s and the wind relaxed a…
CW Practice
I wasn’t sure that I would actually get serious about my CW practice this year, though proficiency has been a goal for me for some time. But a few a weeks ago, someone pointed to a couple of apps and I installed them. I started to poke at them and play them like games in…
Freeze Your Acorns Off 2023
Every year, PCARS hosts a club contest for QRP operations in February. Astute readers of the blog will note that the last one was in…November? Of 2022? Well, things happened back in February of 2022 and the club wasn’t ready, so it was delayed until winter set in. Which, traditionally, in NE Ohio is pretty…
CW Code Study Hack with POTA Activator Data?
A couple of posts ago, I wrote about a script that I cobbled together to pull live activator data from the POTA website and push to a console and to the Mac notifications (assuming I hit a station in a state I’m looking for). As I was working through my CW studies last night, I…
Volunteering
Ham radio is a hobby that has some requirements. The most significant of these is a license to operate. In order to get that license, one must take a test. And in order for there to be a test, there has to be someone to administer it. The system in the U.S. involves volunteers who…
Simple POTA Hunter Script
I found myself poking at the POTA APIs yesterday and decided that it’d be neat to bang out a quick script that might tell me from a CLI (or over my Mac notifications) whether or not a state that I’m hunting on FT8 is on the air. The API is simple enough. So why not?…