TS-850: there were two guys interested. The first was a British ham who heard I had one for sale when he made a QSO on 80m with someone who knows I sell the rig. He lost interest because my asking price (which I even lowered for him!) was too high. Second was a Belgian ham who bailed out after out of the blue one of his friends sold a TS-850 too with more options and even cheaper than what I’m asking. Lucky coincidence? Or just an effort to have me lower the price? I think that 650 Euro for the rig with PSU AND a new CAR unit is a fair price. When I was wondering about the price setting, I told ON4BHQ that it would be hard to get a fair price for it but when you offer it for free, people would get rowdy and step over each other to get it. Too bad because it’s a great rig compared to the crap transceivers you get for 650 Euro.
ON3: Come to think of it, when reading the newsletter of one of Belgium’s biggest clubs, the editor mentioned that he spotted a trend. Namely: more and more people getting an ON3 license NOT for enjoying ham radio purposes but to justify the possession of certain amateur radio equipment. There you go, another view on Belgium’s foundation license.
Log checking soft: The UBA gave me green light. I’m about to make up a step by step schedule of which functions I need to get working and only move to the next item when one part of the project is fully finished. Oh yeah, that Ukrainian station with the nice multipliers. Some of them aren’t multipliers but he’s the only one to work them. And he claims some JA calls that nobody else worked. There are some weird ON stations in that log too. And just because I wanted to know, I wrote some code that tells me he worked 523 stations nobody else worked. That’s 68% of the total number of contacts in his log. Sixty eight percent unique. Maybe my code is not working right? The more I’m working on this, the more weird things start to pop up in other logs too. There is a lot to be done, but there are so many things you can get out of the log data. Rome wasn’t built in a day, right?
Finally some action: Of course, the core business of an amateur radio operator is to play on the radio. The plan is to crank up the tower and suspend the low band wires again. This weekend I hope to be on the air and play some CW. After almost 4 weeks, I really need to make some contacts. Isn’t it ARRL 10m contest and UBA Low Band Winter contest?