I haven’t worked any DX in a while. My inverted V is down right now. My winter hobby is scanner monitoring, and so I have a scanner antenna up on the mast. I still have my small dipole, but it doesn’t perform well enough for me to exert the effort trying to chase new DXCC entities with it. I really do need to get on though and try to work some of the DX that has been on.

I still have a batch of about 50 QSL cards that I need sent to the ARRL Outgoing Bureau. I also have about 20-25 QSL cards that I still need to fill out and send direct / via QSL Manager to various DX that I need DXCC confirmations for. I’m hoping I’ll get motivated to get these things taken care of by the end of the year. Hmm, that only gives me four days.

I’ve used OQRS to get confirmations for half a dozen DXpeditions. I haven’t received the actual cards for most of them yet, but I’ve received email confirmation that I’m in their log and will be getting a card.

I have worked 26 new DXCCs since October 2011, and at least half of them have already confirmed on Logbook of the World. Hopefully next year will be a productive year for working DX. I need to get above 200 DXCC confirmed.

Typically I am absent from the airwaves from Thanksgiving to after New Years. This year I’ve been active, but I just haven’t been posting because it’s really not a fun thing to do.

I’ve been focusing on working DX, sending out QSLs to those who have requested them from me, and sending out QSLs for DX that I need for DXCC credit.

I played in the ARRL 160, 10-Meter RTTY, TARA RTTY Melee, CQWW DX CW, ARRL SS CW, ARRL SS SSB, Kentucky QSO Party, WAE RTTY, and one or two others but just haven’t posted a summary for them. They are all on 3830 though.

Logbook of the World seems to be back to normal now, and it appears as though a large number of DX and general contest ops have recently started using LoTW. I’ve gotten a lot of confirmations from countries that I had never expected to see using LoTW. Of course.

I’ve been hanging out on 10-meters and plan to be on this weekend for the ARRL 10-Meter Contest. Hopefully conditions are decent, because my antennas sure aren’t. Since I’ll have long periods of rest during nighttime hours, I’m really going to try to put in a lot of time during the daylight hours. I do like working the DX, not so much NA.

I just felt like making a post about an operator I listened to in SSCW this year. I won’t mention his name, location or callsign. That should provide him with undeserving anonymity. Suffice it to say, the guy is a well-known contester. According to his website, which isn’t up to date, he has been contesting for years from his current QTH and previous/other QTHs and is a regular in the major contests. Hell, I’ve worked him countless times in various contests.

Anyway, on to the meaty stuff. I came upon this a-hole [who prior to this event wasn't an a-hole in my mind] and was preparing to throw out my call after he finished working another station. He was asking the station for repeats or for specific information, and the other station wasn’t understanding that he needed a repeat of the check (ck) or precedence (prec). The other station kept sending him the wrong information. So the contester gets pissed / frustrated and sends out .-.. .. -.. (LID). The guy he was working may not have been a contester – he/she may have been some casual op passing by and wanting to give this contester a Q. The other op wasn’t intentionally giving the wrong info. I think the contester eventually got the exchange he wanted before demeaning the other op. There are LIDs and there are well-meaning people trying to increase your fun by being a point for you but who don’t necessarily know what you need. So that was strike #1 for the contester. Already I was highly disappointed at what “competition” does to a person.

I went on to listen since there were other callers, and one or two callers later apparently another op wasn’t giving this contester proper information, or the other contester wasn’t providing it in a timely fashion. At the end of that QSO the contester send the other op a ..-. ..- (FU).

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with this picture? Sorry pal, but who is the real victor here? Cap’n Contester with his random bouts of Tourette Syndrome? Or the little guys who are there to give him the points he needs? Why must this guy resort to on-air tantrums?

Bottom line — I see this contester’s posts and summary’s often. He’s a cocky bastard, as some good [and not so good] contesters are, spreading his peacock feathers. He’s got a nice SO/SO2R station. But, he’s a piss poor representative of an amateur radio operator. He’s get an F in Sportsmanship. Whether or not he can make thousands of Qs per contest is irrelevant. His name is mud.

One of the apps in the DX Lab Suite is SpotCollector, which will automatically QSY you to the spot frequency (and split) if you have the Commander app running as well.

I saw the spot for TX7M on 15m and clicked on it to QSY. RX VFO got set to 21.020 and TX freq got set +1 Khz to 21.021. I then decided against trying to work TX7M since I had worked them already on 15m CW. No sense wasting their time and likely adding to the QRM by keying up when they are already in the log.

I then saw a spot for JW5HPA on 21.305. I manually tuned to 21.305 with the radio dial, tuned up, and proceeded to throw out my call for 10 minutes. No joy. Eventually I realized I was still in “split” because I manually tuned from TX7M to JW5HPA rather than clicking on the spot in SpotCollector.

No harm, no foul, right? Well, I continued trying to snag JW5HPA to no avail. I then checked my email, and lo and behold a kind ham emailed me to let me know that I was QRMing the TX7M frequency with my SSB. Yep, that’s right, I was transmitting SSB on 21.021… probably for 10-15 minutes.

The person who emailed me went on to remind me of the DX Code of Conduct because I didn’t state my full call when I was chasing DX.

1. Calling JW5HPA on 21.021 SSB was a major fail. I plead guilty. Where is the wet noodle?

2. Throwing out a partial call when chasing DX? Well, I am going to have to plead innocent on that one. As a rule I don’t do that. Could it have happened? I guess so. I wasn’t recording it, so I can’t prove otherwise. But I would say it was highly unlikely I’d do this.

At any rate, #2 is simply not good etiquette. But #1 is a QRM issue and an actual violation of FCC rules. Where’s Riley when ya need him? I F’d up on that one. Hey, it happens. I’ll brush it off and move on. But I’ll certainly be more diligent when it comes to transmitting. That’s such a rookie mistake.

Thanks to the “Fun Club” for bringing these things to my attention. I’ll try not to let it happen again!

It’s now late October and the first big contest of the season is upon us this weekend, CQWW DX SSB. I still have the same shitty [there is no better word to describe them] dipoles up in the air. What I’ve got is a 100-foot long inverted-V parallel dipole with the apex at 35′ and a 42-foot long flattop parallel dipole with one end at 12′ and the other end at 30′. It’ll do okay for the up and coming ARRL Sweepstakes, but isn’t going to amount to anything as far as DX contests go.

I had high hopes of putting up some combination of a 40/80m inverted-L. A 160m vert is out of the question because I simply don’t have the real estate for a good radial system. Every week this summer I pondered what I should do, but that’s all I did was ponder.

I also thought about trying to find a way to get a Hexbeam at the top of a solid 40′ tree (it used to be much taller until I had the tree guys come and take off the top). But, alas I don’t know of anyone local to hire for such a job. And no, I wouldn’t think to ask other hams to assist. That’d only come back to bite me in the ass if they should fall or get electrocuted — I like my home and prefer to keep it.

I have had tons of time to record audio files to use for the SSB exchanges in N1MM, but I never did it. So I’ll lose my voice two hours into a contest and then be miserable for a few more hours until I decide to throw in the towel.

I’m still plagued by random RF that wipes out my CAT/digital interface. On 80m SSB if I use my Heil headset and handswitch my audio will sound horrible due to RF getting back into the audio chain. I end up having to use a stock mic and my Sennheiser headphones [I prefer them to be honest]. SSB contesting is tedious.

For six months I thought about purchasing the NS roofing filter from ACOC and then sending my radio off somewhere to have it installed, but I didn’t want to be without my radio for who knows how long.

I still haven’t got a proper hole cut through the block in order to bring cables in. So when it’s time to play radio I’m pulling the damned coaxes in from outside and through the sliding glass door. As you can imagine, the electric bill is higher because of this — and in the winter it gets chilly down in the basement with the wind blowing against the sliding glass door that isn’t fully closed.

My antenna mast is more portable than stationary. I can’t raise my dipole to 35′ if there if its windy. It’s not guyed well enough to withstand 30 mph sustained winds let alone 50 mph gusts.

10/15m had been great the past few weeks, but currently the conditions are mediocre on those bands and probably will remain so for CQWW DX SSB. I’ll be trying to make DX contacts against the overwhelming masses of tribanders, monobanders, kilowatt amps and true contest stations.

Really, sometimes I wonder why the hell I do it. I’m a masochist I guess. I’m a pawn on some contester’s chessboard to be sure.

Hope to work you this weekend!

There are quite a few posts I should have made recently, such as some summaries for the TnQP, CoQP, ArQP and OSPOTA. I’ll try to get to them. The problem is that after a contest / QSO Party event is over, I rarely retain any memorable stuff to write about.

So, don’t be surprised if you see spaces of time where nothing gets posted. Lack of a post doesn’t mean I haven’t been operating. I’m usually on, at least for a little while, every weekend trying to work some QSO Party or contest.

Full details can be found at the Ohio QSO Party website including the Rules, a HowTo, the submitted Planned Operations, and an area where you can submit your operation if you are a station operating from an Ohio county during the OhQP.

Oh — one more thing. The Ohio QSO Party does not do Facebook and does not do Twitter. The only official web presence for the Ohio QSO Party is http://www.ohqp.org . Don’t let the impersonator fool you.

Below is a semi up-to-date map of planned fixed, mobile and rover operations. However, this is but a small number of Ohio stations that will actually be on the air. Not all Ohio stations submit their planned operations to the OhQP website. This QSO party is one of the largest / most popular.

Note: Click on one of the counties to see what stations have submitted operating plans for that county. Different colors represent different #s of stations.

View Larger Map

On Aug 11 I submitted an order at www.hostican.com for a VPS. When i was done filling out the form and submitting the order, it redirected me to a thank you page. After a while of not receiving an email verification of my order or a welcome email, I called them up. Understand that I don’t expect to order a VPS and have it automatically set up in five minutes. I do expect an instant notification via email that my order was received and put in the queue.

I called them up and they said it was a busy day and they had a lot of orders. I was told that if I didn’t hear from them by 8:30 PM, give them a call. Well, I had other things to do so I didn’t call them last night.

This morning I still hadn’t heard from them so I called them up a little after 9 AM. The person who answered indicated that there was no record of my order in their system. So we ended that call, and I then went and placed the order again via the website. After placing the order I called them to verify they received the order, and they did. They said it should be set up by 10:00 AM.

I received a Welcome Email at 9:30 giving me login instructions to the customer center, where the email indicated I could manage all aspects of my ordered package. I went and clicked on the link to access the VPS, and the IP address was missing.

I opened a ticket via their support system, and a short while later (9:48 AM) the ticket was closed with the response that “It appears that your vps is not setup yet. You need to wait for a welcome email from us.”

I thought I did receive a Welcome Email from them. After all, the email I received had a subject line of “Welcome to Hostican” and it provided me with a customer ID and password to log into their Customer Manager system so that I could manage the product I ordered. Granted, I did not recieve an email providing me with the IP address of my VPS or the root password. Nonetheless, I technically did receive a “Welcome Email” :)

I tried to reply to the email that was sent from the ticketing system, and the email indicated that the address that sent the email is no longer in use and that I must respond via the ticket system. That’s interesting since the tech who picked up the ticket already closed it. So now I need to re-open the ticket.

Needless to say, so far this experience has been irritating.

~11:35 AM – I re-opened the ticket and asked when the VPS might be up. The response probably won’t be the one I’m looking for.

~11:39 AM – I received this response:

Hello,

Yes, that welcome email means your order is confirmed with us. It usually takes upto 12 hours to setup a VPS account after placing a order.

Thanks

According to their website, 15-20 minutes is what it takes to set up an account. Although they give more details here: http://answers.hostican.com/questions.php?questionid=124

So they may have to verify things? Considering I’ve spoken with them on the phone multiple times, the domain associated with the VPS is in my name with my email address, and I’m calling from my home phone providing useful ANI, you’d think that is all the verification one needs.

Who knows, maybe I’ve already been enough of a pain in the ass [not intentionally] to cause them to simply refund my money after 48 hours. That’s not what I’m wanting. I signed up for a reason. I don’t waste my time signing up just so that I can give them a hard time and waste their staff resources.

Guess we’ll have to see what happens next.

~2:44 PM – Received notification that the VPS was set up. I ssh’d into it and did the prerequisite turning off of unneeded services, editing /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf to my liking as well as /etc/sysconfig/network to change the hostname and do a “hostname server.mydomain.ext”.

Then it was on to seeing what packages were installed and installing those I needed. Lo and behold Yum [the package manager] was not installed. Hey, I’ve been a diehard *nix, especially Linux, junkie since 1991. I don’t need no Yum. But, this is a CentOS [Redhat-based] operating system and as such it most certainly should have Yum installed on it.

~6:38 PM – Rather than installing it myself, I figured I’d ask them why they omitted it during installation heh. I mean seriously, no Yum on a CentOS install? That’s just silly. I figured there must be a logical reason, such as that perhaps they have troubles with customers using Yum to install the stock OS packages over top of ones they shouldn’t [such as those ending in .swsoft, since this is a Parallels Containers VPS]. Of course I knew that wouldn’t be a problem. I already run other VPS’ on the same VM platform with CentOS and Yum installed with no prob. They installed it quick enough, and didn’t give me an explanation why it wasn’t included in a basic OS install.

Everything else was fine from there. Working great so far. Of interest is the fact that the same day they set up the VPS [and I paid for a month up front], they have already issued the invoice for the next month of service. It’s not due for a month, but it has been issued now. Go figure. I think I’ll hold off on that one :)

• 1. I still don’t have a tower up.

If I did have a tower up, it would be no taller than 40 ft. I’d also be stuck trying to figure out whether I want to put VHF/UHF antennas on it or HF antennas. If I wanted to do VHF, we’re talking about 6m, 2m and 70cm all on one tower. Given the spacing required for optimal operation of yagis on those three bands, it’d be tough to get 3 yagis on a reasonable length mast. It can be done though. Many people sacrifice some pattern distortion in order to do this. But, the bigger problem is that there definitely would not be room for an HF directional antenna, whether that be a Hexbeam or a typical tribander.

• 2. If I were to acquire the necessary minimum for a VHF/UHF station, can I really justify the cost and hassle?

Outside of a few contests a year, regular SSB/CB activity on VHF/UHF is hard to come by. And when it is there, it’s usually between stations running amps, using stacks / arrays per band, and it requires one to get the antennas up as high and in the clear as possible.

I am quite positive that if I had VHF/UHF DX capabilities, I’d really enjoy them a couple times a year. But, I’m thinking the rest of my time would be spent regretting the lack of a directional antenna on 10/15/20m.

• 3. Both of my dipoles were put up very quickly and without proper care.

There is no lightning protection on either one of the dipoles. One is fed with LMR-400 with no care taken to protect the coax-to-antenna connection from the weather. By now I suspect that there has already been significant rainwater encroachment down through the top of the SO239 / N-to-PL junction.

No care was taken to waterproof anything at the junction of the ladderline and 80m doublet either. I still don’t have the ends of the 80m doublet off the ground as far as I’d like. I would prefer 10-15 feet at the ends, but right now they are perhaps 3 feet off the ground.

• 4. I do not have proper shack grounding.

I don’t have a shack ground. If I did it wouldn’t be bonded to the AC Mains ground since there is no visible ground rod connection to the AC Mains. I have underground utilities. I’m not sure where the ground is for the AC mains, but there is not a ground rod or ground wire outside at the entrance. Inside there is a ground from the AC to the cold water pipe.

I have no lightning arrestors. Of course they’d do no good without any grounding.

As it is right now, when i’m not using the station I lower the mast to deck height and remove all feedline to the house. It just stays outside coiled up and hanging on the fence 10 feet from my shack.

• 5. I don’t climb. I can’t stand or sit for long periods of time because of my back.

Doing antenna work of any kind usually requires a day or two of recuperation after as little as half an hour of antenna work. Mowing lawn I can do. Standing still and upright working on antenna crap, I cannot. Sitting for extended periods on anything but a couch really can ruin a week pretty fast.

Ok, that’s it for the ranting. I’ve cried a river. In the end, I’ll still be in all of the significant contests and I’ll still participate in nearly every QSO Party I can. Even with such mediocrity for a station, I still have a blast every time I get on and can work some stations. Gotta love the addictiveness of amateur radio.

Field Day is next weekend (June 25/26). I’ll be there, with bells on, running 1D (or perhaps even 1E) from the home with a couple of dipoles. Last year I made 359 Qs in 13 hours. I’m hoping for 600 or more in a 24-hour period this year. If I can do it, you can too. I hope to work you!

PV8ADI and 9Y4VU on CW as well as KP4EIT and KP4BJD on SSB

KP4BJD, Gabriel, was interesting in that he was about 51/52 when he heard me call him, and then once I repeated my call a couple times he realized I was a stateside station and he turned the beam from Europe to me. Then of course he was 59+. He said I should be happy in that I broke a European DX pileup that he was working. He thought I was a PP station. At any rate, he turned his beam towards Ohio and we talked for a minute. Helluva nice guy. You don’t run across too many people working pileups who take the time out to swing the beam away from the action to work a wimpy stateside station. Thanks, Gabriel. You made my day, brother.