It was a very busy ham radio weekend:

Operated from the museum Saturday morning from 1400Z - 1800Z. The best DX was KL7WP/7 from Portland. I got a little excited when we first made contact because I was hoping to get the Alaska contact.
We had two very cool visitors. The first was a little girl and [...]

Last October, I purchased a used, iBook G4 Mac laptop and promptly started looking for logging programs. I found one that was kind of expensive (MacLoggerDX); one that was free, but didn’t want to work so well (RUMLog); and one that worked OK and cost somewhere in between the first two (Aether).
I ended up [...]

Solar physicists have detected, “a modest knot of magnetism that popped over the sun’s eastern limb on Dec. 11th, pictured in a pair of images from the orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).” So says the article “Is a New Solar Cycle Beginning?” on the NASA website.
The article goes on to say, “It may not [...]

Sunday night, I was tuning around 30m and heard 3B7C calling. I was going to call them just to see if he could hear me, but since I’d already worked him on 30m, I decided not to. Except for the pileup, 30m was dead, so I switched bands to 40m.
There, I happened to hear 3B7C [...]

Yesterday, I wandered down to the shack about 2100Z, thinking that I’d make a couple of contacts while waiting for my XYL to get home from work. I switched the rig to 30m and was instantly thrown into the middle of a pileup. I pulled up DXWatch on my laptop and discovered that the DX [...]

I grilled some chicken for dinner today. Unfortunately, the cheap, store-brand charcoal I bought wasn’t all that hot, so it took longer than usual. Fortunately, though, I used that time to fire up the rig and get on 30m.
At 2130Z, Europe was booming in. I got on 10.118 MHz and started calling CQ. Nearly right [...]

Conditions were pretty good tonight on 30m. Just after I turned the rig on, I heard an OZ1 calling CQ and bagged him.
Then, I tuned up the band, found an open frequency on 10.114 and started calling CQ. I got a little despondent after about five or six tries, but then an F6 called [...]

I finally confirmed Cuba with the receipt today of a card from CO6RD, via his QSL manager AD4C. I hadn’t had much luck going through the QSL bureau, so when I saw that CO6RD had a U.S. QSL manager, I shipped off a card and an SASE and received a quick reply. Thanks!
I got more [...]

…and signed up for Logbook of the World. According to the ARRL website, Logbook of the World (LOTW) is
is a repository of log records submitted by users from around the world. When both participants in a QSO submit matching QSO records to LoTW, the result is a QSL that can be used for ARRL [...]

A couple of days ago, I received another package of cards from the QSL bureau. Predictably, most of them were from Europe, including seven from Spain, three from the Czech Republic, and one each from Mexico and Great Britain.
The most unusual one was from the special event station, ED5JAC, commemorating the Ten Days of [...]