Card Checking

Dropping off my cards at the DXCC Card Checker's house Saturday. He checks the cards to make sure that I have what I say I have on the submission paperwork and then sends in my application. This saves me the trouble of sending 100+ cards off to Newington and paying for postage both ways.

The logging software I use, DXLab's DXKeeper, keeps track of all my QSOs, obviously, but it also tracks awards. I tell it what my DXing objectives are, then tell it to create my DXCC submission.

I did that and it came up with 166 QSOs that I can submit for DXCC credit. I'll end up with 100 entities, which will get me the Mixed award, with the rest going towards the various mode and band awards.

I'm doing my inital submission with cards, no LoTW credits. Once I get my initial certificate, I'll do another electronic submission of the other credits. Actually, I'll probably wait until I have enough credits for another award (say, 15 m).

Only took 15 years. :-)

Awards

Seems like the local club is a bit thin on DXCC members. By my count, only four, two of whom are at the top of the Honor Roll. I know that there are two others with cards ready to check, me being one of them. Still, 6 out of nearly 100 members doesn't seem like enough.

I wonder how many have WAS or WAC? The ARRL (and IARU) don't have an online list of folks who hold those, so I can't tell. Need to do a survey of the club, I guess.

I keep threatening to do some kind of QSL/BURO/Awards presentation. Maybe my goal should be to get as many people working on awards as I can.

WAC is easy - 6 QSOs and you're done. EA8 and CT3 count for AF (which is a continent!). KH6 counts for OC. NA, SA, and EU are a dime a dozen. The tough one, at this point in the cycle, is AS, though I've heard bunches of JAs on 20, 17 and 15 lately.

Cluster Effect

I've been making casual contacts of late, which I haven't done in years. I guess it's because I got the WARC dipole back up and 17 m is a pretty calm band, relatively speaking.

I've been doing the QSOs the real way, tuning around and answering CQs. Today, I answered a GI station that was calling and had a nice chat with Victor in Omagh. My PC is set up for logging, etc, via DXLab Suite, and I noticed that he hadn't been spotted. He seemed to be interested in working more stations, so I spotted him.

Never fails. Next time he finished up, he had a small pile-up.

I've done that a few times now and it amuses me no end. If you can watch the cluster for spots, you can post spots, too. Sheesh.

Conduit update

Spouse did some gardening today.



And some fishing.

Oh, yeah. The WARC dipole

Forgot to post this.

To recap, [spouse] and I got *one* end of the WARC trap dipole (30-12 m)
over the Walnut tree but then I kept losing weights and breaking
monofilament trying to shoot over the Sycamore (doesn't help that
there is a Blackjack Oak in the way). Grr.

Went to Atwoods yesterday and got some 20-lb-test line and [spouse]
picked up some fairly big washers to use as weights today.

Got home a little early and started shooting again. *Finally* got the
monofilament over the tree and hauled up the support rope, then guided
the dipole over the in-the-way Blackjack Oak and into the air. Phew.
Coax was already attached from the other day.

It's windy, as you may have noticed, and I see that the Sycamore moves
a whole lot more than the trees that the 5-band-trap is over (a
different Blackjack Oak and a different Walnut). We left a little
slack to see how it's going to settle. With the other antenna, there
is hardly any movement and I've tightened it up maybe three times
since it went up in 2006.

So I come inside and turn on the IC725. I set the *manual* tuner to
bypass to check out the bands. Nearly flat on all three!! Whoo hoo!

Hey. Is that a station I hear on 18.235? Sure enough ... worked
VK9DWX (Willis Is) on the first try.

Yes, I am having fun - why do you ask??? :-)

Thanks to [spouse] - couldn't have done it alone.

Misc work

Well, didn't get the 10 m dipole up. Did get some conduit up that will hold the feedline out of spouse's garden, though.

Also got a pulley attached at the 20' level of the push-up pole. That will eventually hold one end of the 10 m dipole (the other end will be over the crown of a Blackjack Oak).

I also measured the height of the 80-10 and 30-12 dipoles. The former is 7.9 m up (26') and the latter is 11.3 m (37' 2"). Both have a little slack, too, so they can probably gain another few cm if I care to tighten. :)

17 m hopping

A little casual operating on 17 m this morning, something I don't do enough.

Worked a 9A, a W1 (mobile) and a CT (International Polar Year special event station).

Straightened up the wahrs behind the operating position yesterday and finally wound some toroids into the computer's speaker leads. No more RFI on 17 at least. Need to test on other bands.

Might put up the other 10 m dipole today, too.