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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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?…
Northeast Ohio has always been grey and nasty through the winter. At least that’s been the case as long as I’ve been here. There’s not really any point in being down about it. It’s the state of things. When the weekend rolls around, sitting in the house feels like the opposite of what I want…
In NE Ohio, real winter is in January and February. The world gets cold. The skies are grey. That giant orb of light in the sky that we see all summer? It fades into memory. The stuff of stories for small children. When the wind is cold and it keeps people locked into the house…
Monday was MLK Day. There was, surprisingly, nothing on the calendar for the household. No service projects. No Scouting events. Nothing. Just a cold, clear day in January. Without much thought, I decided to head out to West Branch SP – K-1999. This was the first park I tried to activate and the site of…
2023 is already underway and there’s always a strong desire to hang a new calendar and immediately start scribbling on it. Goals. Targets. Whatever the choice of words is, there seems to be a natural disposition to turning a year into an expedition. And that’s not a bad thing. Every hobby needs to have some…