I think it was a good deal to trade WAE SSB for a day at the beach. With an A index of over 20 and even well over 30, an SSB contest where you can only work outside EU doesn’t really seem fun to me. Let the 5kW monobanders fight it out. In stead I spent a very nice indian summer day at the north sea shore with the family. I’d say we escaped the announced T-storms, the main reason for me to skip WAE SSB. At least over my QTH, because yet another storm front passed over western Belgium, destorying ON7RU‘s antenna (pic). Extreme WX has reared its ugly head once again.
What else?I let my CQ-Magazine subscription expire after one year of trying it. The magazine does not really appeal to me. That said, I have the same feeling with QST. Very well made, no bad word about the authors of both publications but it’s hard to discover something new after 10 years in the business that hasn’t already been discovered on the Internet before reading it in print.
The ON5ZO/P field day QSL card + log have finally been uploaded to the GlobalQSL system. I designed a QSL card in my favorite graphic program (Paint.Net) only to find out it wasn’t really ‘importable’ in the GlobalQSL design software. Speaking of which: I had a bad time using it (been a long time since I last used it) and discovered it really is a PITA. It even crashed two times. It has been a long time since a program went south on me taking my unsaved work down with it. Not even my own programs do that 🙂 That brings back memories of the Windows95 BSoD days. 🙂 🙂
Speaking of Windows: time to let Scotty beam the shack PC up to the 21st century. I have an ‘old spare PC’ that is actually more powerful than the current shack PC, that I’m preparing to replace the very stable WinXP shack PC. It is a 64bit system: should I really try to go to a 64 bit OS? Or stick to 32 bit? I ordered 4GB of RAM (which makes 64 bit a logical choice) and a PCIe second video card for dual monitors. The new system will NOT run live until it has received the ON5ZO seal of approval after extensive testing in some smaller contests.
You see: not much radio going on after WAE CW. Time to power up the shack again. Especially with a sudden rise SFI. That brings up a yearly dilemma: what category to play in CQ WW SSB next month?