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Today's #HamRadio #POTA (Parks On The Air) adventure.

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  • Today's (Parks On The Air) adventure. Absolutely gorgeous, couldn't-be-better fall weather on a Saturday, so that it was a little surprising that we found parking space and that all the picnic tables were empty. Used my spiderbeam push-up mast to hold my inverted-v linked dipole up, tied the ends out to some trees, and got on the air on 20 meters, using CW (morse code) as usual. I first hunted operators in other parks and got 4 QSOs, but the pileups were deep, so I found a quiet frequency and called CQ. I didn't have to wait for responses, either! Some pileups were so deep they sounded like modem noise (showing my age here). A little intimidating for the new CW operator, but the other operators were patient with me.

    AZ is one of the states I haven't gotten in my hunter logs yet, so I was happy to see AZ pop up for one call sign. However, that operator reported IL, so I still don't have AZ. I'll have to keep hunting!

    By the end, I was getting a lot of QRM (interference from human sources). That's the curse of operating QRP (low power) — I'm sure they couldn't hear my measly 5W and weren't intentionally operating on top of me. That was OK, though; I had 31 QSOs and I was ready to QRT (quit) for the day.

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    We had a surprise opportunity to go to the beach this weekend, near Southport NC. I have the weird preference to sling my hammock under the house, between the clotheslines, instead of sleeping indoors. Half camping? I use a big rubbermaid box as my "suitcase" and put my shoes on it overnight... It was cold at night, but an underquilt and reflecting bubble insulation in the hammock, with an inflatable mattress on top of my down sleeping bag, kept me cozy.My wife and I went to Fort Fisher State Recreation Area and set up a pair of #HamRadio transceivers. Because this weekend was SSB CQ World Wide DX contest, she couldn't find an empty space to call CQ, and had trouble breaking through pileups, so after a few QSOs she decided it wasn't fun any more and read a book. It was not the CW CQ DX contest weekend, so I successfully activated US-3842 with Morse code. Then back at the beach house, I kept ducking out onto the porch to hunt #POTA operators using CW, with a 33' random wire antenna hanging from a spiderbeam pole, connected to the 9:1 port on my tiny little homebrew QRP dual-port unun. One of those QSOs was with the ham who sold me my KX3 that I used to make the contact! 🎉I gave the random wire a workout with QSOs on 40, 30, 20, 17, and 15 meters. Tried hunting with no luck on 80, 12, and 10 meters.The wind eventually broke the antenna wire off the terminal, so I'll want to fix that before going out again. But at the beach, it was easy to bodge that by stripping back a bit of insulation and screwing the bare wires in the terminal.
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    @bitsplusatoms After all am is for AM. 😀
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    One of my favourite features of the #fediverse is seeing people *learning things*. There are so many folks here discovering dying arts and trades. People learning how the things we take for granted work, and endeavouring to implement them themselves!People getting their #HAMradio licenses, #selfhosting, making clothing, blacksmithing, gardening, repairing their own things, backporting modern software to run on windows 3.11... Y'all are my people. Never stop learning, and never stop sharing what you've learned.
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