Month: February 2015

The ARRL Field Day 2015 T-Shirt is…well, go look, see what you think.

Compared to last year’s shirt, that is just a plain old yawner.  I looked at the grey one first and went “eh,” then looked at the red one and I think the grey one is actually a better looking shirt.

Don’t know what they’re thinking in Newington, but that’s pretty punk compared to what’s come before.

Mind you, I’m not a contester and I don’t even play one on TV.  I have WAS Basic (and digital, if I could arse myself to turn in the application) but I figure I’ll get DXCC when DXCC comes my way.  And so forth.  I haven’t even hung a bunch of QSL cards around my station; they’re in the log, I don’t need wallpaper.

But I’m a little curious as to when the League is going to get off its butt and finish the application forms for the Cerntennial QSO party it held starting a year ago last January 1, and ending this past New Year’s Eve.  It’s like they started the party before they’d figured out how they were going to administer it.  (No!!!)  They did adjust the requirements a bit for the various levels (starting at 1,000 points for the 1st Level award) during the year, but that shouldn’t cause a problem for applications.  According to the website, all of the Q’s had to be uploaded to LoTW in order to be count toward the award:

In order to compete in the Centennial Points Challenge, logs must be submitted through Logbook of the World (LoTW). Logs do not need to be changed from the normal Cabrillo (contest logs) or ADIF (general logging file) files. The system will automatically look for points-qualifying QSOs from submitted logs and apply them to each participant’s Centennial QSO Points table. QSOs do not have to be matched in LoTW for points to be achieved – this is an honor-based QSO Party. We cannot accept any paper forms or information for the Centennial Points Challenge.

So they already have all of the information they need for scoring (they closed the books over a month ago, on January 15). You can check the leaderboard easily enough (I have 1,105 points and am tied for 15,716th place).

So what is stopping the League from putting an application online?  All they need from you is your call sign and whatever $$$ they are charging for the certificate.  They have everything else and can pre-fill the form for you.

Is it just a simple matter of programming that should have been completed months ago?  Or is there something more complex at work here?  Beats the heck out of me what could be more complex about putting in an application for the Centennial QSO Party award.  Bottom line it seems to me that they ought to just publish a list of the folks who qualify for the various levels instead of waiting around for some nebulous web form to be written and debugged that should already have existed and been ready to go as of January 15, 2015, at the latest.  That costs them nothing.  If you want a certificate, the existing structure to put in for WAS and DXCC and so forth ought to be able to handle that.

I dunno.  If I were Kay Craigie, I’d be asking some questions and getting some answers.  In the Masons we talk about how it’s a volunteer organization and you have to be careful about how you deal with volunteers, or like as not they’ll walk away.  But we also have paid staff at the Grand Lodge level, just like the ARRL does.  Sounds to me like someone at the ARRL isn’t doing their job.

I’ll be happy to retract any and all of this if the League would just get out there and tell us what’s taking so long to do something that seems so simple.

So on my way to DC last week, I stopped in at Universal Radio and bought a Yaesu FT-817ND.

I’ve really wanted a portable radio for travel that didn’t involve building and lugging a full-blown go box.  Something I can carry on a plane and take to Florida, for instance.  And I’ve discovered lately (see previous post) that you really can work long distances with a few watts.  So the 817 seemed like a natural for that.

I didn’t do much more than charge the battery and fiddle with it on my trip.  Not much time to begin with and no HF antenna available.  So when I brought it home, I hooked it up to my shack computer and G5RV and tried some digital modes.

No dice.  Absolutely no RF went out on the wire.  Couldn’t figure out why.

So I set it aside and read the manual.  I discovered that there is a dedicated DIG mode.  Of course I was trying to send digital on USB, like normal.  So I switched to DIG mode and voila, the wattmeter jumped and I showed up on PSKReporter.

With only three (3) watts, I was being heard at -12db in Portugal.  I didn’t work anyone there but it was showing up on the PSKReporter map.

I think I could grow to like this little rig.  I have an ATAS-25 portable antenna coming, we’ll see how that works when it gets here.