Sunday, Nov. 27, 2016, 9:55 p.m. — The last couple of nights, 80 meters has been fairly cooperative with my traffic net check-ins. This net did not change its time to follow Zulu time; other nets that began at 0100 Z still do — but the traffic net I’ve been checking into sticks by Eastern time, so it now begins at 0200Z. Its convenient for me to not have to move my “gotta remember the net” time, but it also means the propagation is more likely to be a little screwy, as in “long.”
Tonight and last night though, not so bad.
Last night I checked in with the Vibroplex 100th Anniversary bug; tonight I used the 1944 Vibroplex Lightning Bug DeLuxe. I had planned to dig out some other keys and showcase them, but decided to stick with what works; I can experiment later. I’m going to fire up the video camera to put some of these keys on video; I’ve done several, but I’ve realized a couple of problems.
First, manually handling the camera gives you shaky video, and that’s not much fun to watch. Second, my speech pattern is full of “umms” and “uhhhs” and “ahhs” and I can’t afford the surgery to have that tendency surgically removed from my speech pattern. For now, you’ll have to either live with it, or do as my kids do — avoid watching them entirely.
I will also try to keep them a little shorter and I will try to spend less time marveling over how I love each one like a son (or daughter). I’m a collector, of course I love my keys.
This was a CW contest weekend, and Saturday night 80 was something of a zoo. Fortunately the NCS was able to move off the net frequency and find a 400 Hertz sliver of band to operate in. That lasted until the net was done, and then some polite contestor decided to call CQ TEST about 150 Hertz off our frequency. Pin head!
Well, alls fair in love, war and contesting I suppose. My hamming has been interrupted considerably by ongoing home improvement projects “suggested” by the XYL. For several hours today we cleaned out the flower beds around the house, laid down new landscape fabric and mulched everything nicely. So much for my plans to send the afternoon operating, hi hi!
We have a family Christmas party coming up in a couple of weeks, thus the reason for the honey-dos. Once the party is over, I’ll have more time to devote to operating through to Straight Key Night.
73 es CUL de KY4Z SK … dit dit …