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…
The grey of the week was oppressive. People may not know it, but for Seattle’s reputation for grey skies, NE Ohio beats it for cloud cover over the course of a year. Honestly? It can get heavy after a few weeks. Especially when there’s no snow. All of that white brightens things up. It might…
It was a long bit of time off for me this holiday. I grabbed what amounted to about two weeks of time off and spent most of it with my family around the house. It was a wonderfully low-key holiday season for us. That meant that there was time to head out to the park…
2022 is in the rearview mirror. Seems like the right time to look back at the year in ham radio for KC8JC. Let’s do that, shall we? 2022 GOALS At the end of 2021, I was looking for some Stupid Arbitrary Goals for my hobby. I set four of them. Let’s see how I did….
It has started to get chilly here in NE Ohio. Not a surprise for December. I had a long week and decided that the thing that I really needed to do was get out in the field. There is a wonderful silence in the park when it’s cold. There are fewer people around and the…
A very brief field report. On the 26th, my wife, the puppy, and I went back to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park – K-0020 for a dog walk and a little radio. The weather was almost too nice. It was sunny and quite warm in the open. I netted a pretty good number of contacts…
The results are in! My dad and I came in 3rd place with a score of 1,566 points. Not too bad for a day where the propagation was absolute garbage and we were mostly talking to ourselves in the park via phone modes. FT8 was the only way out, sadly. But we stuck to it…
Well, I did it. I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t hit the Oasis Activator award for K-0020 this year, but my long birthday weekend brought it so close that a quick trip out to the park the day before Thanksgiving sealed the deal. While things were setting up in the fridge and we had…
It was a big week for me with a milestone birthday and all, so I took a couple of days off that led to a four day weekend. I activated Cuyahoga Valley National Park – K-0020 on the 17th and just knew that with three more days in the weekend, getting one a day was…