2 October 2021 This was the start of a long POTA weekend for me! I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to get out because the weather forecast showed thunderstorms all weekend. I took the chance and headed about an hour away from home to Pere Marquette State Park near Grafton Illinois. […]
26 September 2021 I was looking for a good spot for the 2021 Illinois QSO party and decided to try and do a POTA activation along side the QSO party. Looking at the POTA site I noticed that K-1029 Wayne Fitzgerrell State Park is on the boarder of Jefferson and Franklin counties. Pavilion 1 is […]
12 September 2021 The weather here is finally starting to cool off so I decided to see how my pack does on something longer than a 50 foot walk from the parking lot. The parking area is pretty easy to miss, and only big enough for 4 cars max. The trail head is fairly overgrown […]
So I decided that today was the day that I would get out of the shack chair and into the wild! By the wild I mean a nice park table at Carlyle Lake which is two different POTA parks. I activated K-0991, but I think you could easily count this as a 2fer with K-4114 […]
Spoiler… it was fun I participated in the Missouri QSO party this year from in the state. Being in the Illinois side of the Saint Louis area made it an easy trip. It took a while to decide on a location though. Originally I planned on camping in a state park on a county line, […]
So I decided to sell of some gear and buy the Icom IC-705 and it’s matching tuner the AH-705. I initially hooked it up to my home QTH antenna, a 43 foot vertical with my existing Icom AH-4 tuner. It worked great of course, but being a home station isn’t really the intent of the […]
A Nice Local Find I recently picked up a Vibroplex Vibrokeyer on FB marketplace. A local guy was clearing out some of his dad’s old gear. It was hard to tell the condition from the pics but I met up with him anyway and paid $50 after making sure it wasn’t just totally falling apart. […]
I put together my Morseino-32 v2 today. It was very straightforward to put together. Some of the soldering was a bit tight, but as long as you have a small tip on your iron you should be fine. I pulled out the magnifying light to make it a bit easier. The instructions are on OE1WKL’s […]
I just made my first CW QSO! On top of that it was with K3SAV which is an International Marconi Day special event station! Thankfully they were very patient and willing to work with my poor sending.
Part of the fun of moving to a new QTH is getting to design and build a new station. My old entrance panel was very permanently attached to the old house so it was time to go buy a new one. The old panel was a DX Engineering DXE-UE-2P. It served the purpose at the […]