I spent part of this week hamming, and added two new states and one new country to my totals. I am not exactly setting the world on fire here, but I think I'm doing pretty good considering the extremely abbreviated schedule I keep.
The new country was Cuba. I heard the station quite loud as soon as I turned on the radio, and gave him a call. He was working a station in Ohio, and proceeded to work stations in England, France, and Norway before getting around to me. I was glad to get a nice signal report (remember, only 4 watts here) and a new country.
One annoyance is that two weeks after passing the extra class exam, my upgrade still has not made it into the FCC records. I would not be surprised at the delay but for the fact that the examiner said I should see it in 5 or 6 days.
My MFJ single-band radio has a habit of dropping RF power if I transmit more than a few minutes, which is not conducive to effective communications, to say the least. The output power shown on the power meter drops to near zero after 3 or 4 minutes transmission. Technical support at MFJ thinks this is a heating problem in the RF driver transistor and they are sending me a heat sink to install to see if that will cure the problem.
My next opportunity to get on the air will be December 12. I will see how the heat sink works out then.
Posted on November 28, 2003 06:43 PM