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EUHFC 2008

I discovered this contest a few years ago and I like it a lot. In 2005 I did about 600 contacts low power. I made 950 QSO or so in 2006 when going QRO. I astounded myself with over 1200 QSO last year so stakes were high in 2008. I don’t want to repeat myself but once more can’t hurt: 2008 is really not a good year for me in this contesting business. Motivation low, propagation low and it has become a statistical certainty that contest weekends bring bad weather. Usually in the form of storm or heavy winds and during summer the WX even throws in some thunderstorms. Regulars know that I have a field day setup: all antennas down except for contests. A crank up tower under high wind load is lethal or at least unhealthy. The weakest point is my 80m vertical. It’s a killer antenna for EU and DX but an elevated GP with feedpoint 4m high and a flimsy 15m high radiator do not support wind or gusts. No I can’t guy it as I don’t have access to the other side of the garden. Long story…

So it wasn’t any different this time. One of the biggest T-storms since we moved in 5 years ago dropped on our heads Thursday night with fall out on Friday morning. No use cranking up the tower before Saturday then. And so I did. Tower up to ‘EU take off level’ (yagi @ 15m high, enough for EU only). The wind was present but definitely not a hazard to the tower and yagi. Then I put up the 40m GP that can stand more wind than the 80m GP. But the wind was blowing too hard for the 80m GP. It would remain up when installed, but it would be a pain getting it up in the first place. I tried that too often in the past. Must be a funny sight for sure, but not for me with the clock ticking to the start of the contest. It wasn’t the first time my 80m contest operations were in danger thanks to the meteorological powers that be. For this year’s UBA DX SSB in January I needed to think of and execute a ‘plan B’ a few hours before the contest. I made a 80m dipole since I wasn’t expecting any DX in the SSB part. However I could not raise that dipole on the tower’s pulley this time since the 160m dipole already took that spot. And I know from experience that 2 dipoles for 80 and 160 interact when too close to each other. ‘Cross polarization’ antennas do work though. With about 3 hours to go I decided to use the 80m dipole in a strange configuration. A long shot…

I raised one leg on the tower’s opposite side pulley. I grabbed the feed point and stretched it as far as the garden’s edge. With a piece of rope in a spruce tree I suspended the feed point about 1.5m above the ground. From there I took the other leg and used it as a single elevated radial also 1.5m high, going back to the tower. All this was done making sure the 80m experiment would make an angle as close to 90° to the 160m dipole’s plane as possible. I needed to avoid interacting and coupling between both bands. It took a little pruning and adding some wire to the radial formerly known as Dipole’s Leg but it got resonant. Only the dip was too sharp reducing my 2:1 bandwidth too much. This was measured right at the feed point so I figured about 50m of coax into the shack would broaden this due to the losses. I ran to the shack and hooray – we had achieved "broadbandness". I could span 80m CW with SWR low enough (less than 1.5) not to trip amps or fold back power. No coupling on 160m. The Top Band dipole was still resonant where needed and everything else seemed to be working. ON5ZO, I dub thee the McGyver of antennas. A wire and a rope and he makes a resonant antenna. If only this stuff actually radiates and picks up RF!

You see, it’s all this stuff that has attenuated my contesting fun. A turnkey setup would be easy: sit down, flip switch, fire CQ at will on all HF bands. In stead all my contest efforts turn into a one-man field day show over and over again. Setup up, play radio, break down, store till next weekend. Repeat sequence. But it’s like that and it will remain like that. Moreover faint heart never won fair lady (or a contest for that matter) so by this time I still had one hour to go and I was ready. Boy was I ready! The XYL cooked la lovely lunch (I really liked that sauce honey!), I took a shower and with 10 minutes to go I hit the chair.

I proceeded to checked 10m. Uh oh… Empty! I ran there prior to the contest last year to reserve my seat and made an 120/hr on 28 MHz to start the contest. Let’s do this on 15m then this year? Same story. At 12.00utc I tried to run 10m, dropped to 15m and made QSO #1 after 4 minutes… on 20m! Oh boy, nasty. That 20m QSO was to make sure the RX was working. Back to 15m. I made 2 QSO there for a total of 3 and already 9 minutes were gone. I figured this situation was the same for everyone so let’s all end up on 20m gain shall we? I ran 20m, moved to 15m and 10m to do some S&P then ran 15m and tried running 10m again. This was absolutely a propagation nightmare and a night and day difference with last year.

The rest of the contest I kept staring at last year’s rates I printed and realized that if my 80m antenna turned out to be crap, it would be even more of a mess. The rates were low, and apart from no propagation it seemed that there was not too much of a crowd on CW. When I finally got to 40m the band let me down too. I’ve seen it better for EU only rates. The facts for the rest of the contest:

  • The K3 is really a great rig. I need to tweak some parameters a little further and explore some of the possibilities. It was the first time on the low bands and I’m very happy with it. I don’t feel it is inferior to or more complex to operate than the TS-850 which is my personal benchmark. I don’t care about figures HI.
  • The 80m antenna worked great for EU. I can’t tell what it would do for DX after this one. The band was noisy and I tried several settings on the K3 to make this better. Sometimes successful, sometimes it would mess up. I need to RTFM on the noise blanker.
  • I made more QSO on top Band than last year. I achieved almost the same number of the 15m mults in just over half the QSO’s there. Go figure.
  • G4PIQ calls in on 160m. He asks for a QSY to 15m. It’s 22.19 utc. Skeptically I grant him the favor and ask to QRX while I turn the yagi around. He agrees to call me on 21005 in a minute. After some more contacts I QSY and call a few times with 100W as I don’t want to retune the amp. In vain of course as 15m has been dead all day. No answer and I don’t hear anything anymore around 21005. Back to 160m. In a lull I return to 21005 a few minutes later where G4PIQ calls me. Coincidence as it’s already 4 minutes after the initial QSO. We exchange reports and I go back to 160m. This kind of successful action is the salt and pepper on my contesting!
  • I spent the last 20 minutes on 160. I reasoned that I had sucked 40m almost empty, and that I have 60 more QSO on 80. That means more chances for people to work me on 160. I get called by 4 more mults in the last 5 minutes. Great!

I haven’t checked 3830 for the comments and scores so I hope everyone suffered from the bad propagation and that my score will be in the top 10 again. It was fun but not as much fun as it would be with some propagation. Fingers crossed for 2009!

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Antennaworks: K9AY loop @ ON5ZO

Last Sunday my nephew and I put up the K9AY loop. A temporary setup for testing purposes only. Apart from a light sunburn, all went well. Except I discovered the PVC sticks I bought in a garden supplies store are in fact metal sticks covered with a layer of PVC. I use these as corner supports for the wires. I did some initial testing at about 15.00 utc on all HF bands between 7 MHz and 28 MHz. Not really the targeted bands for such a loop nor the right time. The plan was to test at night when the Low Bands would show some life. But around 19.30 the sky began to darken and roar. So I took the wires down and disconnected all coaxes. Glad I did: half an hour later we had a severe T-storm with nearby lightning strikes.

So further testing is in order when I find a more permanent place to put it down. I must say that the loop seems to hear as well as any TX antenna here on the higher bands. But I only heard signals in a 1000 km radius. Directivity wasn’t great but that might be due to the proximity of the signals or to the corner supports that turn out to be conductive after all. I should look for strong bamboo sticks and find a way to jam them into the ground without breaking them. The setup works so I only need to tweak it and do some serious nighttime testing.

Speaking of antennas: I found a REALLY interesting article on 4SQ antennas on the RRDXA website (link here). It’s written by DF6QV who designed the 4 square arrays used on TS7N, 5A7A and more recently VP6DX. Reading the article makes me (and you?) dream of big 80m arrays. My garden is a tidbit too small for that. And it would only be blown over by the storm on every contest weekend. As a coincidence I received my VP6DX QSL card in the mail today. In fact it is not quite a card – it’s a real 16 page booklet the size of a QSL card. It’s full with descriptions of the setup and the expedition in general with a lot of nice color pictures. Great signals, great expedition, great QSL!

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Tower maintenance + some HF contacts

Normal life here is on a break. My niece and nephew are here for their annual holiday visit which means there is time for some radio. Not too late or too early though because the shack is also a sleeping room for the moment. With an extra pair of hands available eager to turn the winch we tilted the tower over this week. Time to realign the WARC dipole over the tribander’s boom. They got shifted in one of the storms earlier this year. I took the opportunity to do a visual check of all elements of the antenna system. It’s been 15 months since I last checked everything up there. All nuts and bolts still tight, weatherproofing seemed OK, lubricated the tower’s moving elements. I found a loose nut on the bolt of one of the ‘roller thingies’ that makes the inner section of the tower glide smoothly. In fact it was a nut / counternut combination. The nut combo was tight alright but it wasn’t screwed against the plate so the ‘roller thingy’ could slide over the bolt that serves as a shaft. Gee this is hard to describe. Should have taken a picture.

When the tower was vertical again my tower-intern insisted on cranking it up. And so he did. I let it there from Tuesday to Friday. In the mean time I checked daytime propagation with about 300 QSO. Oh solar spots, where art thou? I really like casual DXing in between contests but -and I keep coming back to this- this is very boring. I guess most people feel the same and don’t bother to get on the air awaiting cycle 24 solar spots. Of course the W’s and JA’s suffer the same disease: not getting out of their own continent. Hang in there friends. I hope we’ll soon meet again above 18 MHz.

WX forecast mentions heavy T-storms the coming days, so on Friday I had the winching intern slide the tower down and I disconnected all cables before they enter the house. While I am typing this the sky is roaring. This weekend is IOTA contest. Last time I checked I wasn’t attributed an IOTA reference so why bother? A real IOTA activation is still unchecked on my ‘try at least once’-list though.

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Hooray for Russian hams!

I’ve said it before (read it here) and I’ll say it again: contesting without UA from here would be very boring especially with the current propagation. Russia hosts the next WRTC in 2010 and put up a dry run contest yesterday to test the operation’s sites (near Moscow) and log checking system. When I read the announcement on Radio-Sport.net I decided to give it a go. Only four bands (10 > 40) and only lasting 8 hours. Like usual ‘CW only’ was my preferred category. I took an extended lunch break and put in about 6 hours ending up with almost 550 QSO. I had a couple of fast hours on 20m (120-130 rates), one 120 hr on 15m and the average rate got very low by trying 10m. I didn’t try 40m since it was broad daylight and the wind was 5 Bft so going outside to put up an antenna wasn’t quite appealing. Everyone could work everyone and there was plenty of activity. Especially when you consider this was a special contest outside of the regular schedule and there hasn’t been made a lot of promotion.

You could tell that by the reports (ITU zone). Some sent their CQ zone, others sent a serial. A German op sent ‘5NN 061’ and I asked for his ITU zone. OK no problem: ‘5NN 14’. Nonono, ‘ITU ITU ZONE – DL IS 28 28 BK’. ‘ITU ZONE?’. So what do you do in this case? Change his serial to his ITU zone? Apparently the guy made over 60 QSOs giving a serial number. The bozos on the CQ Contest reflector always state that ‘you log what is sent’. So let’s say I log ‘061’ (which I did). Scenario 1: he doesn’t submit his log. Log checkers say: DL = ITU 28 so my QSO is wrong. Or then the guy realizes he needs to change his serial numbers to a fixed zone report. I’m screwed again!

It was a lot of fun and I’m sure the UA guys with their R33-prefixes will have knocked themselves out. At least the top scorers (see results). They averaged 150 QSO / hour over the 8 hour stretch. I hope we’ll get some feedback soon about the site construction (tower / antennas) and the observations. I had a great time and it was nice to play with the K3 in a contest. That rig really is great!

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In the mean time @ ON5ZO

The summer here continues to disappoint us but nevertheless I managed to prepare a 7m high support for the K9AY RX loop. The support is made of the remains of 3 fiber glass poles that cracked under the ON5ZO workload. I also collected all mounting hardware including a ground rod. I started constructing the relay box somewhere in 2002 only to realize the TS-850 does not have a RX input and I wanted to avoid yet another relay box for RX/TX switching. So the K9AY box was put on hold. Last year I bought a second hand commercial switching / termination unit because I knew the unfinished project would remain in the drawer. Earlier this week I opened the box and saw at least 3 poor soldering points. I hope the thing works better than it’s soldered!

Yesterday I did some woodwork. It can’t always be drilling aluminum or solder copper. I put my band decoder on top of my rigs. That’s cool with the TS-850 which is flat but I use the K3’s bail so the backside of the rig slopes down. This causes the band decoder to slide down to the back of the rig where it covers the amp module’s ventilation holes. So I made a small wooden shelf to put over the rig where the band decoder now resides in a flat position. By the way: the current economical lull shows in the DYI stores. In the past you could ask and get scrap pieces of wood for free. Leftovers from sawing big panels. Since I only needed a small piece the size of my K3 that matches the desk’s design, I wanted to go the free leftover route. Those times are gone. The policy now is to buy the whole panel and since you paid for it, you take the leftovers with you. As a result beggars like me are forced to buy a whole panel since there are no more scrap pieces. I refused to buy a panel only to use 5% of the surface. So I made my little shelf with a simple smooth wooden plank. It does not match the desk’s surface color 100% but it’s close enough.

Contest results, anyone? Results are out for the 2007 CW Oceania DX Contest. OQ5M is country leader! Yours truly is also the only Belgian log submitted. The sweet thing for me is that I made 5 QSO with ZL on 80m and some VK/ZL on 40m. 5 ZL’s on 80 in a short time span…

The ARRL managed to publish the ARRL DX CW 2008 results in less than 5 months. I only did this one very casual (see blog entry). I finished #11 world so I missed seeing my call in QST. That’s still good for #8 in EU for SOAB Assisted. With a serious effort Top 5 should be possible. So if in 2009 the WX cooperates, my K9AY loop is up and running and I’ll have the time to play… I do not mention the propagation factor. Better SFI makes for better competitor’s scores too.

About conditions: still no luck. This is what K7RA wrote recently in the ARRL Propagation Bulletin: "The weeks seem to drag on with no sunspots in sight… [snip]… I have no idea when this will turn around. Cycle 23 seems to be unusually long.". Yes indeed! But then again NASA tells us to stay calm and keep the faith (see link). Only time will tell.

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Another contest missed (IARU’08)…

This evolves into a blog about a contester that does not seem to contest… After RDXC and WPX CW and some smaller contests I also let IARU go by. And while I made a few hundred QSO in the other two, I didn’t even touch a button in the shack this weekend. We put new fencing around the garden last week and that took longer than anticipated due to unforeseen circumstances. The weather to name but one. We had to take shelter quite a few times. The current season is called summer but the WX doesn’t show. Not at all! Strong winds and heavy showers. The job got done Thursday so I could set up the station on Friday but that was yet another windy day with lots of rain and I really didn’t want to get wet again. I was tired and not motivated. WX cleared a bit late Friday night but then there was a local T-storm which prevented me from setting up and the forecast predicted more of the same on Saturday morning. So I decided NOT to participate in the IARU contest and the XYL agreed to go on a trip to the North Sea coast on Saturday. WX was said to be better there and it would clear up from west to east.

Saturday morning it was more of the same: rain and wind. While waiting for the train on the platform, I received a TXT message on my cell phone from OT1A. He actually was setting up for the contest and got all wet. Yes indeed: another shower accompanied by strong gusts was upon us. I think I made the right decision. On the beach it was quite sunny yet cold and a very strong wind. We arrived back in our home town and got out of the train at 9PM local and it was a blue sky with absolutely NO wind. That was a painful moment. Should I have set up Saturday morning? Probably not as experience tells me that setting up a few hours before the contest starts makes Murphy show up. So you end up in the chair 5 minutes before the start all stressed out and tired before making the first QSO.

When I got home I looked at the DX cluster and saw mostly EU-EU spots. Crappy conditions were confirmed by ON4BHQ / OQ4B by MSN. Wim was working the bands but did not report sudden magical propagation. I looked up spots for OT1A but they were few and not really DX. No loss then and I sent a mail to ON4WW to see if he was home on Sunday. He kindly brought me some stuff from the Friedrichshafen ham fair that I still had to pick up. So on Sunday I headed over to Mark’s place and we had a nice long chat about ham radio in all his aspects. I really enjoyed the ham talk and seeing his low band antennas again gave some ideas.

Then I decided to make a detour and make a surprise visit to OT1A and see how well he did. My ETA there was about when the contest ended. I entered his shack with less than 15 minutes to go. My presence ruled out a post contest nap and once again I had an enjoyable ham radio chat. On my way home I called local ham ON4AFU who still has my UBA contest awards he brought from a UBA meeting. Bummer, he wasn’t home so ham talk #3 got delayed until Monday (tomorrow). That gives me the time to find two nails to put my trophies on the wall…

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Two weeks later…

It’s been two weeks since my last posting. Not a lot happened on the ham front.

I sold one of my TS-850 transceivers. I got a fair price and the buyer bought a bargain I think. I made a small test setup and he was happy. He said he owns 10 HF rigs and mine will be #11 and his second TS-850. If I decide to replace the other TS-850, I hope it’ll be as easy to get a correct price for it and sell it as fast as this one.

I found a buyer for the microHAM cable that got replaced by a K3 cable. I sold it through the RRDXA mailing list. No market for that stuff in Belgium. Another deal that pleases buyer as well as seller.

Last week (Tuesday June 24) I got home and cranked up the tower one level. With the 6m hentenna (no typo) about 15m high I was able to work a few stations in CW. First QSO was OY. Then an ON. Some EA, F, DL, G etc with modest signals. So either the hentenna is not a miraculous antenna or the 6m opening that evening was only so-so. I guess some of both. I need to get used to sending the grid square. I remember that from my VHF DX days. Before passing the CW test I only had access to VHF so exchanging locators was daily business. I must admit I don’t care about grids but of course on VHF… I don’t think I’ll get hooked on 6m soon. Magic band? I’d like to call it a tragic band to quote KH2D.

So I ended up on 30m again. A band that never lets you down. A dozen W’s and a VK. No JA though and lots of EU. The next day I woke up and found 30m empty as well as 20m. Looking outside it was clear the WX was tilting over to bad. I thought it was going to rain with T-storms. So I lowered the tower again. I didn’t make a QSO since. What I managed to do was a little bookkeeping in my logs and upload to eQSL and LotW. I really need to get that box of incoming QSL cards that has been waiting for me for almost 6 months now. I am not looking forward to sorting and processing those. It’ll be a whole lot.

Next week is IARU. WX forecast doesn’t promise nice weather to set up all the antennas on Friday. Last year was excellent WX the days before and after so I could crank up the tower and install all antennas in a relax summer pace and enjoy some DX as well. Regrets, I had a few, but then again… I’m starting to regret I blew up the PJ2 deal

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The 6m hentenna

In the late 80ies – early 90ies MTV ran a campaign that said ‘Books feed your head’. How true. So what does a ham radio freak feed his brain? Right: antenna books! One of my favorite books is Simple and Fun Antennas for Hams (an ARRL publication). It’s a book full of practical antenna designs and ideas. No rocket science formulas or complicated theories. I have those classic reference books as well but I saw this publication on a ham fair years ago and I couldn’t resist. Sometimes you need a design plan that simply says "measure that long – cut here – solder there". The book is full of those plans.

Since I have a K3 now thus gaining 6m access, one of the issues that kept my mind busy lately was: "what antenna to make for 6m". It should be very cheap, ultra light, small footprint, easy to construct and even easier to put up. No big yagi or quad. I’m not planning to set 6m records nor work 6m firsts. I just want to see what the 6m fuss is all about. I considered a 2el yagi, a moxon, a vertical, a dipole, a sloping dipole etc. To get some inspiration I sent Google to get me some ‘6m antenna’ ideas. One of the antennas that popped up after a few clicks was the Hentenna. I immediately connected this name to the Simple an Fun book mentioned above. It is described in this book and I remembered the design as a simple antenna with a few interesting aspects for the upper HF bands (small, cheap, light etc). So Thursday night I grabbed the book off the shelf and took it to bed to review the design plan. Friday morning (a day off!) I woke up at 6 AM or so. One hour later I was in my workshop (garage, storage room, dog house, whatever) constructing the 6m hentenna. I collected all parts from my huge collection of junk parts and odd ends. The job got interrupted by the daily life and I resumed building in the evening.

The odd thing was that the ARRL book said to connect the feedpoint 1/6th of the length measured from below while the online article said 1/10th. I esteemed the ARRL book more trustworthy than an obscure web site. After all the book is edited by N6BV – the ARRL’s antenna guru. The job was done and I put it up with a rope and pulley on my tower. No resonance. SWR sky high. Dimensions were right and connections were checked. Nothing. I assumed the tower was coupling because it was too close so I moved all the stuff (coax, antenna analyzer, antenna, tools) to the other side of the garden to my 80m elevated radial support with extra free pulley. Same story. It was 9PM local and I was very tired. Note to self: collecting stamps – no fuss!

My last resort was to lower the feedpoint from 1/6th per ARRL instructions to 1/10th as per website (DL1GSJ). You know what? BINGO! DL1GSJ 1 – ARRL 0. Resonance and SWR 2:1 or lower right at the feedpoint which is about flat in the shack due to cable losses. I didn’t care to prune any further. I moved everything back again to the main tower and raised it to 8 meter high. I needed to free our cat because one of his paws got entangled in the rope. Always fun, pruning antennas with those four legged rascals playing. The analyzer showed a perfect graph so I ran upstairs into the shack and tuned to 50 MHz. The problem was I only heard the beacon ON0SIX with S4 and QSB… I hope to test it soon during one of those highly touted 6m openings. The book says that the word hentenna comes from the Japanese ‘hen’ being fantastic or miraculous. I hope the proof of the pudding is in the eating…

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Playing with K3 put on hold…

My K3 is built.  Glimlach
My K3 is tested.  Glimlach
My K3 works.  Open mond
My K3 is integrated in my microHAM / N1MMLogger SO2R setup.Uitgestoken tong
Problems encountered:   Ontblote tanden
  • The N1MMLogger voice keyer has problems if the soundcard to play the WAV files is NOT Windows’ default sound card. The MK2R+ has two USB sound cards on board. So I need to make the voice codec the Windows’ default sound card and disable Windows sounds. That’s the reason why it sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. I only do SSB contesting every so often so each time I prepare for a SSB contest…
  • Same with RTTY. If I want to play in a RTTY contest, I always need to get it going again. But this time a K3-related issue popped up. It got pinpointed by someone on the Elecraft reflector. It is more or less in the manual which was right next to me and opened on the page that could have solved my problem. But I didn’t connect the dots.   Beschaamd
At least it works in CW ‘out of the box’. I made a dozen contacts and then playing time was over.
 
In the mean time we finished a construction job in the garden. There’s another one coming. This limits my on air activities for now. I’d like to build a 6m antenna to try 6m with the K3. I have no clue what to build because it a) need to be constructed fast and b) should be easy to put up. I don’t want to compromize my HF setup. It’s crowded enough already on our lot. And I really would like to fot my K9AY loop in there too now that I have RX antenna possibilities with tke K3. But where to squeeze that one in?
 
I hope to sell one of my TS-850’s next week. I have a possible buyer. Maybe next year sell the second one? I though to replace it with a TenTec Omni VII for the LAN-remote operation but… Why not replace it with a second K3?  Knipoogje
 
Enough silly emoticons for today… 73!

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Elecraft K3 S/N 001048 is about to get baptized

I once read that "stories only happen to those who can tell them". Here’s a story to tell about the K3 that got delivered and taken away (twice!) in one smooth walk from the UPS guy…

After waiting for 4 months since ordering I finally received my Elecraft invoice on June 5th. That usually means the K3 is almost underway. I saw my VISA had already been billed by Elecraft so I sent a mail to the sales department. They promptly replied in a kind message that I would get a mail with a UPS tracking number as soon as my box left their premises. Great! I needed to estimate the ETA because I knew UPS was going to charge me the VAT on import. That’s to be paid COD so I needed to have quite a lot of cash in the house. Not that much but way more than I carry around on an average day.

In the mean time I ordered some stuff for the shack (switched mode PSU and a hand full of plugs) from a German distributor. Last Wednesday I got a mail with a UPS tracking number (feel it coming?) for that parcel from Germany. I tracked it and assumed that my German parcel would arrive Thursday afternoon (best case). Great, I was at home. Still no tracking or any other sign of life from Elecraft.

At 14.00 local time a UPS van stops and I rush to the front door. The driver was going through all the boxes in his van. It took him at least two minutes to step out and walk to my front door. What was that? Two boxes? For a small PSU and some plugs? Oh no… Could it be that my K3 was here totally unexpected?

The UPS guy walks through the door into the living room and informs me that I need to pay a few hundred Euros. I look at the cargo label. Sure enough: Elecraft. But I didn’t know it was coming so my cash flow at that point was a little shy. I tell the guy I’m happy to see him but that the company hadn’t updated me and so I wasn’t prepared to pay that amount right away. I asked where he was heading to next and learned that he needed to deliver a parcel downtown (‘downvillage’ would be more appropriate) so I convinced him to meet me there and exchange the goods. The store he needed to go to has an ATM in front so I could withdraw enough cash to pay the bill. He agreed and picked up both boxes and while walking to his van he advises me to grab some small change (2.35 Euro: 2 + 0.20 + 0.10 + 0.05 = 4 coins) to get the exact amount so that he doesn’t need to give change – because he doesn’t have any.

I lead the way to the center of our little village because his GPS proposed another route. Now you should know that in summer and when I don’t need to go to work, I always wear shorts. Shorts with shallow and wide pockets that hold 2.35 Euro (4 coins) for Mister UPS. We arrive on the spot where I park the car and jump out. Uh oh… I recognize that clink-clank sound. As I moved my leg the coins fell out of those shallow pockets. Right between the center console and the driver’s seat. If there is a god, he doesn’t like me. I kneel down and start digging for those coins, moving back and forth between driver’s seat and back seat. UPS Guy watches in amazement and suddenly yells he’ll be back later and moves off. I guess he ran out of patience and went on to deliver some more boxes while I was digging for money. That’s the second time that transceiver is taken away from me! All coins were stuck in the slide of the seat. Not easy to get to them, and I had no tools at hand. At this point I didn’t have a K3 either. Finally I managed to pick all coins and wipe the grease off. Those car mechanics sure put some grease in the seat’s slides!

Now off to the ATM on the other side of the road. I envision the dreaded message "This ATM is empty. Alternatively please go to…". Living in a small rural village will yield a short "Go To"-list. But no such message and I can withdraw enough cash. A few minutes later Mister UPS returns and the deal is sealed. I return home and start unpacking the box…