This Just In…

Yeah, that’s me, just in…from another roadtrip up Nawth…where it was, in a word, cold cold cold!
Started off at W3LPL’s, planning to do the ARRL DX Test, but discovered one of the support ropes broken on the 160M four square Friday morning at breakfast. (Frank actually saw this from inside the house, which surprised me,, but it IS his station & he should know what’s what.) Anyhow, we went out & found that only the short 160M vertical tower needed to be climbed to do the repair, so that was not bad. Spent the remainder of the day getting ready, etc. K1HTV & I on 160…ended up getting some better propagation than our W PA rivals, who only bested us on 20M, a nice end to the weekend. Then over to K4VV’s place, where we worked in the shack on the switching matrix, reset the Big Bertha rotation calibration (repaired another blown pot on tower One, what’s causing that??), then moved over to his in-house AB-621 setup, where there was some broken stuff, 80/40M dipoles, etc. The early morning temps were in the teens, which made for some chilly foot-stompin times. Wednesday night I moved down to Fredericksburg, VA, & showed up at NI4F’s. All went according to Hoyle, until we unpacked the new Yaesu 1000 rotator. Could not make it work.Tried everything, including continuity checks on 200 ft of rotator cable! Who knows what’s what with that. Brought it home to trouble-shoot, after putting the broken 800 back in place on the tower to hold the beams.
Home around 2AM. What am I thinking, I ask myself? Stay tuned, indeed….