W4FT on Amateur Radio

NASA reports an M-9 class solar flare erupted around 03:59 UTC this morning (around 11 pm EST Sunday night) from sunspot 1402. Just short of an X-class flare, it is expected to arrive around 14:18 UTC Tuesday, Jan. 24th (around 9:18 am EST), give or take 7 hours. This follows an M-3 flare from sunspot 1401 that erupted between 15:15 to 16:30 UTC Jan 19th. The resulting CME arrived around 06:30 UTC (1:30 am EST) Sunday morning, Jan 22.

Does this mean that solar activity is suddenly ramping up in intensity? Will we be getting better and better HF propogation in the immediate future? We’ll have to wait and see.

For more details, check out http://www.spaceweather.com/

TA-33jr installed on Chimney Mount

Well, “a” TA-33 is up, not the same one.

The upper bands have been heating up all summer and I was getting the urge to do something to improve on my antennas. While the HGSW antenna does a fair job all around, I wanted something better. Read more…

Oh, it is contest season!  Having wrung out all the problems in my shack during the CQ WW DX contest, I was really ready for this one.  And, it has become one of my favorite contests.  I even passed on one of the better hamfests of the year and on participating in a public service event, just to stay home for the contest! Amazingly, everything wasn’t ready.  I thought I had it all set, but no.  It wasn’t quite right.  The short version? It took me about 20 minutes into the contest to get all the voice files right and speakers connected where needed.  Despite the setback, I was off and running earlier than I have been in past contests.

Contacts came fast and furious. With the upper bands opening up, the start of the contest was different from recent years. I immediately started getting contacts west of the Mississippi. Way west! Early contacts included AZ, WY, NM, SV, ID, NM, SCV, WWA, SF, BC, EB, PAC, AK. Within three hours, I also had ND, WY, MB, NT, OR and NL.

Wow, Pacific, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and even both Dakotas early on! This is going to be another clean sweep! Search and pounce was the order of the day.  I scored section after section quickly.  In fact, I had well over 60 sections in a few hours. By the time I knocked off at 3:00 EST to get some sleep, I had about 72 of 80 sections in the bag. Read more…

Contest season continues with the CQ Worldwide DX SSB contest.  For this one, I thought I had everything ready in advance.  A few weeks back, I put a 3 element Mosley TA-33-jr 20/15/10 beam on the chimney and have been getting pretty good results with it.  About the same time, I replaced the shack computer. In the days before the contest, I applied all the OS updates, I updated the data files for the logging software and set up all the sound files, hot keys, and other settings. It didn’t take long to figure out that there was a small problem. Read more…

I’ve noticed a lot of hits on last year’s Makin Room for Turkey Ride post on this site. My guess is that folks are looking for this year’s info. If you’re looking for this year’s GPS files, Read more…

It’s October!  Are you ready for the CQ WorldWide SSB contest at the end of the month?

Link to CQ WW WPX Contest 

I’ve been sitting around here trying to figure out what I want to do about the CQ WW SSB contest.  I’ve already challenged one of the local hams and might throw down the gauntlet in front of a few more.  But do I want to make any changes to the shack?  I still have the HGSW beam hanging in the trees above the houes (see earlier posts), but I’ve been hearing a lot about the upper bands coming to life.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tri-band yagi up, at least for comparison?  Maybe it’ll help me get more contacts this year. These thoughts created an itch that I just have to scratch! Read more…

Here’s the latest hoax, at least in the North Carolina area.  Today, (Wed. 9/28/11  1:45 pm, I had to record it somewhere)  I had a call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft Tech Support, who asked for me by name.  He claimed that my computer was sending massive numbers of error reports to Microsoft and was calling to help me fix this.

Ding, ding, ding!  Red Flag!  Read more…

If you haven’t heard yet, there is now a new weekly internet show about Ham Radio.  It’s called HamNation and is produced by TWiT TV.  Hosted by Bob Heil, K9EID, the show is live on Tuesday evenings at 9 p.m. EDT. http://live.twit.tv/ All episodes can be downloaded from the TWiT website,  http://www.twit.tv/hn with each week’s show usually being added on Thursdays.  And if you’re really interested, they run a chat room online at the same time. Read more…

Here’s one for the books.  Today, I hooked up my new toy, a Rigblaster Advantage, and spent a fair amount of time testing. With a local friend listening on HF, I tested it out as a voice keyer on all the bands before this weekend’s CQ WPX contest.  I wanted to make sure everything was working fine, and that there were no distorted signals on any bands.  For the most part, everything was fine, but there was a surprise in store.  Local talk radio station WPTF was in the background on my signal! Read more…

Okay, this isn’t ham radio, but I couldn’t find a solution for this problem online and the solution took so much effort to get to that “eureka” moment that I wanted to share it.

Are you getting a CLR Error 80070002 on your Windows XP Media Center Edition  when you try to actually run the Media Center Software?   Maybe you’re getting this error elsewhere on the same system? Well, with help from Microsoft Tech Support, we found the fix.    It all revolves around the combination of WinXP Media Center Edition, .NET Framework ver 1.0 and Windows Update. FYI, this is the OS that arrived on my Sony Vaio desktop system.   It took two months to identify, but here’s the story. Read more…