Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018 — We’ve been having lousy band conditions AND weather conditions here in the Ohio Valley of late. We are such panty waists compared to you hams in our northern climes — 3 inches of snow shuts us down for a day, closes schools and throws a literal wrench in the works. Well, the rest of the story is Sunday night we had a good deal of sleet, freezing rain and ice pellets followed by a couple of inches of snow. The ice made doing much of anything Monday treacherous; the additional snowfall on top of that Monday (and the temps in single digits) refroze highway surfaces and made treating the roadways more complicated, not to mention the additional snow.
But my son and I dug out today in our four-wheel drives, and as is usually the case, the worst part of the drive is our driveway. The second-worst part is our county road, which I don’t think saw a plow at all until today about 3 p.m. Our road was a skating rink for the most part. Such is life in rural Kentucky.
CW NET? WHERE? The aforementioned stinky band conditions have added insult to injury — not only is it cold and miserable outside, but I can’t hear the NCS of my CW net. Hell, I can barely copy stations trying to check in. I checked and double-checked to make sure the antenna tuner was set to dummy load — it was that bad.
Tonight the family was watching TV at high volume, so I opted to retreat to the (relatively quiet) confines of my shack.
Mistake #1 – Going into my shack barefoot. I immediately stepped on the business end of a Heil mic boom peeking out from under the bench. Had the TV not been blaring so loudly the family might have actually heard me scream in pain. Go figure.
I had time to kill before the net, so I checked out some of the ragchew roundtables. Come 9 p.m. net time, I was there — and so was my NCS, 20 db over S9! All the stations checking in sounded great, even the ones considerably off frequency. Had more check-ins that usual and all of them sounded great! I was like the 9th or so to check in, and then —
Mistake #2 – I had my 100th Anniversary Vibroplex Original hooked up; this would be the first real contact I had had with a bug in quite some time. Cognitively, I knew I was operating a bug, but my fist had other ideas.
Apparently my fist believed I was still operating my Vibroplex Square Racer Deluxe here in the Library, and as I formed the first charactor of my call, I heard only a long DAAAAAH. My fist was waiting for the keyer to complete the dah while sending the “K” in my call. I realized my error and recovered quickly enough to complete the most gawd-awful sounding Morse character in recent history. I can only assume the NCS recognized 1.) my shaky fist, or 2.) the rest of my callsign.
WHERE’S THE EBAY GOODIES, JIM? Hey don’t ask me, I only work here! OK, enough smartass answers, I’ll go with the unvarnished truth — my daughter and son-in-law basically eloped in Michigan and we had a wedding reception for them right after New Years. Brother, I though Amateur Radio equipment was expensive! — Fellas, I think we’re in the wrong business! By the time you pay the caterer, reserve the photo booth, the photographer, the DJ, rent tablecloths (??), rent this, rent that — buy cakes, buy this, buy that — it adds up quickly.
Not to mention Christmas expenses and a host of other bills due by year’s end. The only thing I’ve been able to afford is to window shop on eBay for the past 2-1/2 months. And naturally, there have been some sweet keys passing through the eBay pipeline.
My ebay activity has been limited to Christmas gifts, textbooks for my son the physics major, a battery for his laptop, etc. Nary a key in sight (not a new one, anyway).
My best ham-related purchase was last month sometime … I picked up a Heathkit SA-2040 antenna tuner (the big roller inductor tuner without the meters) for under $100. The tuner is a little rough around the edges on the exterior, but inside is clean as a pin. About the same time I also picked up on eBay a large-based Blue Racer. They aren’t that rare, but I don’t own one and the price was right (i.e., low!).
That’s enough this trip … 73 es CUL de KY4Z SK … dit dit