After a very fine turnout for the ARROW breakfast, this weekend was all about the CQ WW DX contest. I didn’t really operate all that much–only 2-1/2 hours total–but had a lot of fun doing so. The bands were open, and over that period, I made 50 contacts (although one turned out to be a dupe), scoring some 8,200 points.

Yesterday, while working a guy on 30m, we got to talking about antennas, and I mentioned that I had a fan dipole with legs for 30m and 40m and a 20m ground plane antenna. He said, “That sounds good. With that setup, you can work four bands, 40 through 15.”

I almost slapped myself.

One interesting thing I’ve noted about my CW is that when I’m in contact with an operator that’s making a lot of sending mistakes, or just has a poor fist in general, I tend to be sloppier with sending than if I’m in contact with someone who’s sending very accurately. The reverse is true, too. When I’m not at my best, I notice that the other operator makes more mistakes than he or she would likely make if I was sending better.

The moral of the story? If you want the operators you contact to send good code (making it easier for you to copy), then you need to make every effort to send accurately yourself.

On Thursday night, I worked KC9ERZ in Santa Claus, IN. I told him he should get a Santa Claus picture and use it as his picture on QRZ.Com. Jingle bells, jingle bells….

I’ve had access to a shortwave radio for as long as I can remember, starting with my grandparents’ old Philco (see the very first entry in this blog). If you don’t have one, but still want to listen to shortwave radio, you now access several shortwave receivers over the Internet.

I thought I’d come down to the shack and see if I could scare up a QSO on 40m before watchingn Law and Order: Criminal Intent at 9 pm. After tuning around a bit, I call CQ on 7.035, and get HI8RV, Chikin, to answer my call. I’ve worked him several times on 30m, but never on 40. Then I tuned down a bit, cranked the keyer up to 24 wpm, and call CQ on 7.028. This time I get a call from HB9BCZ near Zurich and swapped 559 reports with him. I’m tempted not to watch the TV show with the band open as it is, but I just shut the rig off for the night.

Overall, it’s been a pretty good weekend for casual DX.

This year, our club’s Tech class has a bevy of Boy Scouts–13 to be precise. That being the case, Roger W8ZRF thought it would be a good idea for us to participate in the Jamboree on the Air (JOTA).

Last night, I worked TF3IRA, the station of the Icelandic Radio Amateurs, Iceland’s ARRL. They have a very nice website that explains that they meet every Thursday evening, at which time their station is active on both VHF and HF. I worked them on 20m CW. They don’t say what kind of equipment they’re running, but I’d bet it’s a nice setup.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, I would pore over the catalogs from Allied Radio, Lafayette Electronics, Olson Electronics, and others. These were quite comprehensive, including not only electronic components, but radios from all the major manufacturers as well as their own line of kits (Knight Kits). I bought my first shortwave receivers–a Hallicrafters–from the Allied Radio catalog, and my second from the Lafayette catalog. I would spend hours with these catalogs, considering the radios I’d like to buy and pricing out parts for projects I was considering building.

Tech Online (www.techonline.com) provides a number of free, online seminars for registered users. In their recent email to me, I noted a couple that might be of interest to ham radio operators: