After the traditional last three weeks of residing in the shack during the last three weeks of December, comes the traditional "off time" in January. I try to do as many work for school in advance because next month it’s ARRL DX CW, UBA DX CW, ARRL DX SSB etc etc. Then comes RDXC, WPX SSB etc etc. So the first QSO in 2009 will be made in the UBA DX SSB contest in the last weekend of this month.
Last Monday, the KRX3 arrived. That means my parcel travels from California to Brussels in under 48 hours. Then the online tracking stops while my box gathers dust in the Belgian customs’ warehouse for over three weeks until it finally gets delivered. They charge 25 Euro for this sloppy service. UPS fixes this in the same 48 hours door-to-door but this box came via USPS who handed it over to the Belgian parcel service ABX. Striking: when a real commercial company (UPS, FedEx, DHL, DPD) delivers, there is no problem and you can follow the box on the Internet. With Belgian "government owned companies" à la ABX and TaxiPost… Slow service and a pain to get the parcel when you weren’t at home at the time the van stopped by.
I need to clean up my working table to assemble the KRX3 unit and install it into the K3. I hope that project will go well and the K3 will be healthy after the operation. It’s planned for the second half of this week.
Other than that, I’ve been writing code for my ADIF project (I refuse to buy a crappy DX4WIN update). Next week it’s a New Year’s meeting at my local club and I plan to pick up yet another 6 months of incoming QSL cards. That means I need to get the export for Global QSL right. My DX4WIN version does not export QSL manager info in the ADIF. Go figure. In stead of paying for this P.O.S. software, I wrote my own routines last year and I need to rewrite them now for .Net.
Speaking of old VB6 and .Net. I’ve had some troubles getting the old Visual Basic (non .Net) to load the N1MMLogger source code. I need to rewrite the module for the UBA Winter contest and there was a question to add another local contest. But there were several problems with registering a needed OCX under Vista and after solving this, there was a problem in the code too with this OCX. All is fixed now but once again it shows that Vista has problems you don’t encounter under XP. And that the .Net technology and its programming tools are my preferred environment…