Without a doubt, home-made pies are better than store-bought pies. I should know–I make great pies.

I’m not so sure the same holds true for antenna feedlines, but this e-mail came across the Elecraft mailing list over the weekend, and I thought I’d share it with you:

…you should subscribe to the ARRL Contest Rate Sheet. If you’re not interested in the contest info, you can skip right over that stuff to find the news items and technical tidbits that Ward Silver, N0AX includes in every issue. The latest issue, for example, includes:

An article recently appeared in the Toronto Star extolling the virtues of the vacuum tube. If you ever took a close look at one, you’ll see what an amazing device it really is. The article gets a little sidetracked by its discussion of tube vs. solid state guitar and stereo amplifiers, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Without tubes, there is no radio. Nor are there any computers.

Last Friday, I got another pack of QSLs from the ARRL QSL Bureau. There were about 20 cards total, the most interesting being:

• F5BAR. This card from Jean-Luc in Provence is a beautiful card, with an aerial shot of a fall scene. A bonus is that it also fits nicely into my collection of cards from stations whose suffixes spell words.
• EN3WLL. This card is from a special event station commemorating the 150th anniversary of the igniting of the first-ever kerosene lamp designed by Ignacy Lukasiewich at the Lviv hospital on 31 July 1853.
• MU/SP5LCC. This station was operated by a Scout troop from Poland on the island of Guernsey.
• EA1ASZ. This card lists the “Normas de ban~o en 1877,” which translates to “rules for bathing.” The second rule states, “In no case is it permitted to bathe without being completely clothed.”

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I’ll have to get a scanner and scan them so you can all see them.

A lot of people bemoan the fact that Heathkit and the other kit companies of yesteryear are no longer with us. How, they say, will newbies learn how to build radio gear? Well, the picture is certainly not as bleak as they make it.

There are many companies making kits. They may not be as easy to build as Heathkits, but they’re certainly not impossible to build, either. Below, please find a list of vendors. I’m going to be adding to this list as I find them.

• TenTec. TenTec makes a wide range of kits, including transceivers, transverters, receivers, and accessories.

Band conditions have just been horrendous this past week. After my poor showing in the CW SS contest on Saturday, I decided to take a day off on Sunday, so I didn’t even try to get on the air Sunday. When I did finally get back on Monday evening, I found that there had been a coronal mass ejection (CME) and that the shortwave bands were almost completely blacked out.

LCARA Captures Newsletter Contest
It was a very close contest, but in the end the Lapeer County Amateur Radio Association Waveguide has won the 2004 Club Newsletter Contest. The top three finishers included:

Things don’t always turn out the way you hope–that’s just life. Well, Saturday was one of those days for me.

I’ve just come into possession of a remarkable treasure–namely the ARROW archives. It’s an amazing and amusing look into ARROW’s past.

For example, the archives contain copies of the newsletter produced from November 1988 throu April l994. At random, I pulled the April 1989 issue from the files.