Added another state today. I am now using the radio from my truck, which has marvelous effects on spousal amiability. I can pop out to the truck to work some CW without disrupting the household order, which makes for a much more peaceful day.
I am still waiting for my license upgrade to go through. It has been 5 weeks since the exam.
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.
I am an amateur extra class licensee.
I took the extra exam this morning, and passed with 94%. This license class used to require passing a 20 words-per-minute Morse code test, sending and receiving. Although I love CW, I was resigned to never achieving 20 wpm. I did try the extra test back in the 70's but you had to pass the Morse portion before you could take the written portion, and I couldn't get past the code test.
So that's where it stood for almost 30 years. I had not been paying that much attention to what was going on with amateur radio licensing until the last couple of months, when I noticed my license was about to expire and decided I wanted to become active again. Surprisingly (to me, at least) the code requirement for general and extra classes is now only 5 wpm. That explains why nearly all licensees are either Technician (no code requirement) or Extra class. If you can't do Morse code at all, and are happy to talk on 2-meter FM, you do the technician class. If you can do a little Morse code, and are fairly well prepared in the technical area (radio theory, electronics, etc.), you can do General or Extra.
So now I have passed the Extra class test (sometimes disparagingly referred to as "Extra Lite"), and can go chase the exotic stations that only hang out in the bottom 25 KHz of the bands.
Another Friday off, an opportunity to try for some contacts. I didn't get started until around 12:30, and tuned into an absolutely dead 15-meter band. I am using an MFJ-9015, a CW-only transceiver which tunes only the CW portion of the band. Scanning from top to bottom yielded only static and occaisional spurious tones.
Around 1:00 I heard some weak activity in the low end of the band, below 21.010 MHz. I am not currently authorized to use that segment, so all I could do is listen. The signals were very weak, and after a few minutes I moved on.
Around 2:00, though, the band started to pick up, with activity mostly between 21.040 and 21.060. I was able to work a station in Washington with a very good signal report (remember I am only running 4 watts). Shortly after, I worked a station in Maryland. I heard a station in Ontario, Canada, but a lot of other stations were also interested in working him, so around 4:00 I packed it in.
Tomorow I am taking the examination to upgrade to extra class, so that I will be able to use those segments that I can't use now.
I spent the day trying out new antennas for my amateur radio station. I like to work CW (that's Morse code for the non-initiated) so I recently bought some CW-only radios to use. I originally built a wire antenna, but my wife took "mild" exception to the sight of the antenna strung up in the trees in the backyard.
As a compromise, I got some mobile antennas which normally are used on vehicles, but when used in pairs make a reasonable facsimile of a dipole antenna.
I should mention that I have been inactive for about 6 years, so I'm sure it was a shock to my wife when I suddenly started to take an interest in radio again. She probably thought she had seen the last of the radios.
I use both 40 meters and 15 meters (look it up, I'm tired), and the 40 meter antenna just did not want to tune. There did not seem to be much activity on 40 today, either, although this may have been due to the antenna tuning.
I switched to 15, and the band was alive with U.S. stations. I heard stations in Michigan and Minnesota, and worked stations in North Carolina, New York, and Florida.
15 meters is normally a DX band, that is, a band where U.S. amateurs can work stations in other countries. I worked a station in France with the wire antenna a while back.
But DX propagation on 15 meters is highly dependent on the sunspot cycle, and the cycle is in the downward phase. Also, the solar storms this week have not helped conditions on 15 too much. Conditions today favored "short skip", so that most of the stations heard were within about 1500 miles of my location. I did hear a station in Hawaii calling, but could not work him. My transmitter only runs 4 watts, so all contacts are a challenge.
So I have a few new states to add to the list. If I can get the 40 meter antenna working, I should be able to add to the list pretty quickly.