For ham folks who stumble here, the tl;dr is I’ll try to activate four parks on the air as TF/WT8P. I will be QRP, which means CW or FT8 are preferred modes. Logging should happen pretty quickly because Iceland is well-connected. I’ve been overthinking my trip to Iceland, but this is what I’ve settled on: Day 1: Arrive 6:15 am […]
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Notes on Field Day 2023
I wrapped up another field day with my friend Paul (W7PEZ) in Eastern Washington. For the two days, I had 204 contacts, broken out roughly as: Paul worked 200 contacts, nearly all CW. Both are personal records. Neither of us were “running,” which would certainly have bumped up the totals, nor did we operate all the time, because most of […]
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Triple Play
In geocaching, there are a lot of “challenges” published, where in addition to signing the log, you have an alternative logging requirement (“ALR”) to perform some feat. These can be as simple as “find 10 mystery caches” or “find a cache for every letter in the alphabet,” or more complicated. In my 15 years, I’ve done a lot of these, […]
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Quieter fans on the Elecraft K4D
My first HF radio, the Elecraft KX3, was air-cooled and got me spoiled to the relatively quiet operation. The K4D, on the other hand, has two fans. Although the “base” ventilation speed has been lowered, there’s also some whining from the bearings. Most hams can’t hear it, I, unfortunately, can and don’t enjoy the sound. I’d previously replaced the ones […]
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Displaying K4 Spectrum in N1MM
In mid-December, N1MM (version 1.0.9758) introduced a spectrum display option supporting the Elecraft K4 radio. Below is a walk-through on setting it up. For this to work, your radio will need to be connected to your local network. You can check this by tapping the Menu option and scrolling to the middle. You should see a valid IP address like […]
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Parks on the Air
In addition to all of the geocaching I planned, I also thought I’d try activating some parks. Parks on the Air (POTA) is a program inspired by the ARRL National Parks on the Air program in 2016 by Sean Kutzko (KX9X) and Norm Fusaro (W3IZ). The idea is simply “everyday is field day,” that is, you take your radio crap […]
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Field Day 2022
Paul (W7PEZ) and I worked field day as 2B EWA, that is, we set up with battery-powered equipment, everything self-contained. The national forest site near Cle Elum was fantastic – great view from a ledge, higher elevation (near 4000′) so it was cooler, very quiet, and trees to mount antennas. Paul brought his ICOM 7300 (HF) and a Yaesu 857 […]
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Configuring N1MM+ CW for the Elecraft K4
With my KX3, using N1MM+ to manage CW sending was accomplished via an indirect set of KX3 macros and keyboard sequences. Thus, we had this awfulness: Bob (N6TV) presented at the Spokane DX Association and mentioned this on slides 52, 62, and 63 of his presentation. There is a lot of good information in his presentation, and you should view […]
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