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Doctor, please check patient ON5ZO’s pulse

No worries. There is a detectable heartbeat. It even approaches overdrive sometimes. But you can’t detect much RF being radiated. That does not mean there is nothing happening here. I just don’t feel like writing much, and honestly there isn’t much to be written on the ham radio level. Not YET!

About two weeks ago I reassembled the WARC vertical with its elevated radials. I had a sunrise ball on 30 on Saturday (like I said, two weeks ago). The 10 MHz path to W6/7 is still there. Darn that sunrise comes pretty early on a weekend with no contest! But it was fun so why not do it again on Sunday? A bust. I got hardly any replies to my CQ and the RBN showed pretty low values. What a difference a day makes!

Belgium wouldn’t be Belgium if the nice spring weather wouldn’t suddenly exaggerate and produce thunder and lighting. So I had to unplug the whole shebang again. And when the station is unplugged and disconnected, you don’t just hop into the shack for a quickie. Luckily I took precautions as one severe lightning strike took out cable TV and internet access for a few hours. No damage at my place but a CATV node in the neighbourhood got taken out.

Now that Dayton is behind us and the Big News got out: over the last month I spent quite a few hours testing the brand new N1MMLogger coming out. Don’t ask me when. I had the privilege to be part of a team that got to try the Dot Net version and look for bugs. I haven’t had the chance to run a contest with it but I did log 150 ‘general DX’ contacts in CW and it seems to work. Everything old is still there – at least what I am using, and there are some new and reworked features. I also worked closely with N2AMG who is part of the select team that actually writes the code. He was the lucky one *wink* to rework the WAE code and provide the new QTC interface. I only tried CW so far but I guess it’s ready to use. I would use it. I will use it. Although you can test all you want, there will probably something that you don’t think about that pops up in a live situation.

What else? Gee either I forgot or there just isn’t something to report. Apart from the job that pays the bills and the household/garden/kids, I have been working on a hardware project for future use. But there still is a lot of work to be done. Mostly construction and welding.

I also finished the log checking for the UBA SSB contest. And I pre-processed the CW logs in order to start the actual checking. Once again I came across some pretty darn ridiculous user errors. And it still is next to impossible for some people to synchronise the date and time on their logging computers. Oh well, I stopped ranting about that here for now. It’s just much easier to fix the errors myself with the help of Marc ON7SS than to mail back and forth trying to get the operator to fix it. Or make him understand the problem.

Next week: WPX CW. Unfortunately I have an event at work on Sunday *grouch grouch* so it’ll be SB-something. I have yet to decide what. If anything because early predictions once again mention thunderstorms. Reminds me of the 2010 edition

PS: 2410 spam comments blocked in three weeks time!

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