I have had a couple of fruitful days. The day after I worked KH6AQ, I was in my truck during lunch and talked with Joe, WD5DWC in Bogalusa, La. The next night, I was able (barely) to chat with Craig, K7UIE in Portland, Oregon. Today at lunch I had a short QSO with Ann, KE6OIO, in Garden Grove, CA. Those last two contacts gave me signal reports of 229 and 219, respectively. I guess the band wasn't doing as well as I would like to the west coast.
But tonight I went out to try UA0AZ again. I could hear him, but he wasn't strong here and there was a pretty good pile-up on him. I tuned down to 14.011 and heard a really loud station calling CQ. It turned out it was Emily, P43E in Oranjstad, Aruba. We exchanged 599 reports and I have a new country in the log.
At some point I want to:
1) Try using a random-wire antenna with the tuner and maybe battery power;
and
2) Buy an Icom IC-703. The price has been reduced to $410 at Texas Towers.
Mmmmm.
I tried the wire antenna. It was a pretty impromptu deal, a 17-foot piece of hookup wire strung across the room and fingers crossed that the AC safety ground was enough of an RF ground to work.
It wasn't.
The receiver was hopping, the DSW has a really hot receiver. But when I tried to tune, I got about three key-downs and the final transistor went to silicon heaven. I have read reviews of the DSW and the only complaint I saw was the fragile final transistor. That doesn't apply to the current models, they use a big tabbed transistor with a healthy heat sink. But this older model uses an RCA 4011 in a TO-5 can, to which I have added a top-hat heat sink.
So I tore down the radio to replace the final. Turned out my iron wasn't hot enough to do the job, not sure what the deal is there. So next day I took a fast trip to Fry's for a new iron, a solder sucker, and some solder.
I got the transistor out pretty easily after that, and replaced it with one of my spares. It works fine now, back in the truck.
I am in another dry period with no contacts since the last ones reported below. I did score a couple of new cards, including Hawaii, as seen at right. So here's the SWL report:
RN9ACQ, heard on 14.030. Check Nina's picture at that link, she's one cute Russian!
I changed my style sheet to highlight the QSL cards better, and it kind of messed up the left side links. I'll try to fix that up when I get a chance to look at it some more.
UPDATE: ah, that's much better.
Listened to 15 meters at lunch today. There's a mini-opening into Europe going on, with several F5's, one F6, and a couple of G3's on 15 CW, and I think one DL4. I gave a call to LU3VI in Argentina, which elicited a ?? in response, so at least he heard me (sort of). He told the guy he was talking to that he is running 20 watts, and he was pretty loud here.
I ordered a MK-60 keyer from Electronics USA today, so I can get that sexy keyer sound on my other radios.
Here's a big happy birthday to my daughter, who turned 20 on Monday. Thanks for 20 years of joy and love. We love you.