Just like The Boomtown Rats song. Especially after an extended period of holidays. Coffee might help? But I don’t drink coffee… Apple, cinnamon and raisin tea is good too though I’ll probably won’t get a boost out of this. Anyway last weekend was ARRL RTTY RoundUp. I managed to squeeze out ZERO QSO. I wasn’t active at all. Last QSO was December 31, 2007. In stead I worked for school on Saturday. Just like Thursday and Friday – they cal it holidays DUH! And we had to go on a family visit yesterday.
I just checked LotW. Great to see quite a few new users and regulars who have uploaded a bunch of new logs. Even my 20m and 30m QSO with N8S were there. YT1AD brings us many new DXCC and goes on DX contest expedition but I have a poor QSL return rate from his operations. I must admit that I don’t bother to send a card direct and use the ‘QSL buro‘ in stead. So I’m not throwing stones here to YT1AD. Glad to see he’s using LotW now too!
There was a ‘minor’ email problem last weekend. Somehow someone initiated a mass mailing with my @on5zo.be domain name. I got a total of over 700 emails like ‘Undeliverable’, ‘Could not be delivered’ etc. I had the ‘catch all‘ canceled. The situation has settled now.
There were a handful of messages on the DX4WIN reflector. It seems that there are more people malcontent. I’ve overcome its flaws as experienced by me for the moment. I refuse to pay for an upgrade. V6.03 will keep serving me until I start using something else. I played with DXLab a while ago but I think it’s too complex. Too complex for me right now as I don’t have the time to get to know yet another program let alone a whole suite of programs. I was impressed though by the power and features of the program. And it’s freeware. All my operating is done with N1MMLogger so I only need a program to keep track of my log, award standings and interface with LotW.
If I might close this one by recommending this link: http://www.wv7u.com/ Hank’s site features two very nice homebrew amps but I keep going back for his biweekly quiz. I was too late for the last issue since I needed my trusty TI-68 calculator which was out of reach for the holidays and I was too lazy to go get it. I thought this quiz was running some longer but it didn’t. Bummer since it was a piece of cake and only a matter of calculating. Anyway: give it a shot!
Take care, 73!