Last Saturday–a week after Blackout 2003–the board of directors of our ham radio club held a meeting to discuss what, if anything, we should do to be prepared for the next emergency. One of the members showed us how he had set up a store-and-forward repeater by connecting the 2m antenna on his tower to an HT. Connected to the HT was a Radio Shack device that recorded up to 20s of speech and then spit it back out. Being battery-powered, this system is immune to power blackouts.

Unfortunately, our repeater is not. Apparently, the fire codes forbid any batteries up in the space where our repeater resides, leaving it vulnerable to power outages.

The 30 meter band is pretty dead right now, so I thought I’d use the general coverage capability of my ICOM IC-735 to do a little shortwave listening. The first thing I did was tune down to 10 MHz to get the time from WWV. Not only did I hear WWV, but some SSB station with the operator saying over and over, “Mirando, mirando.”

Yesterday, I seemed to have the big signal on the band. The first station I worked was SP2EBG in Poland, who gave me a 579 report. Later that evening, I worked a station in Florida who said I was “booming in.”

Well, tonight, it’s just the opposite. I must have called CQ 15 times without a responses, and all around me other stations are calling CQ and making contacts. I guess it’s just the yin-yang of ham radio.

As you can imagine, there’s been much consternation on the FISTS mailling list about the move towards eliminating the CW requirement. After beating this around for a while, the list then started focusing on the number of current operators who send poorly. While I’m not sure that there are more poor operators now than in the past, one theory is that the reason one finds so many slow operators and operators with poor fists is that there is no longer a Novice class.

In the past, the first license that most hams got was the Novice class license. For a while, Novices had some phone priviledges on the 2m band, but for the most part, they were restricted to CW on 80m, 40m, 15m, and 10m. They were able to hone their CW skills there, and by the time they upgraded, they had some solid CW experience.

Lately, I’ve been amused by calls whose suffixes are short words or common abbreviations. For example, about a month ago I worked W8GND (ground), and on the FISTS mailing list, W8FAX is a frequent contributor. Scanning my log, I also find TA3AX and K4IR(infrared).

I kinda think I’d like to have a call like that, maybe K8HAM or W8ANT or the call that my wife would probably give me: W8BUM.

I ran across a call the other day while perusing the QRZ.Com database that I definitely would NOT like to have: KD6UMB.