Whiskey Alfa 5 India Charlie Alfa

The cold season is arriving in Texas, which will inevitably cause a cutback in my operating. All my operation is from the truck, and gasoline is too expensive to run the engine to heat the truck, even when I am using AC power for the radio and antenna.

I will still operate “mobile in motion” from the truck, but that is only a fraction of the available time.

Meanwhile, I am up to 82 DXCC entities confirmed but stuck at 45 states, since Kentucky and West Virginia came in. I had hoped to finish basic DXCC and basic WAS before winter curtailed the operating, but it looks like that will be difficult.

New York and Vermont were worked during Sweepstakes, and the stations are LOTW users, so there’s still hope that they will upload some logs and get in the books. That will leave Arkansas, Mississippi, and Nebraska to finish all 50.

I will keep trying, you never know what might happen.

Here’s something I’m happy about:

I think I will print up a card and get it in the mail to Germany for this one.

Update: As I expected, within 30 minutes of posting this, one of the SS stations confirmed New York. So that’s 46 states, 4 to go.

Up to 80 countries confirmed in LOTW: ZD8ZZ just came through for Ascension Island.

Still waiting for New York and Vermont QSLs.

I am working more digital to fill in some Triple Play slots, JT65 and RTTY. Yesterday I worked California and Japan; today I worked California and Guam.

Well, that was grueling. 137 QSOs, 55 sections, for a claimed score of 15,070. I let N1MM Logger do all the driving for this contest, so I could try out the CW interface I built. It worked quite well, but it’s disconcerting to be in a CW contest and have the paddles sitting on the floor of the truck, disconnected.

I managed to work 2 states I need for WAS, which will bring the needed states down to 5, if they upload to LOTW.

I have found a way to load the Cabrillo file from the logger into a spreadsheet and output it as a comma separated file that can be edited into an SQL command file to load my contest QSOs into the PHPLogbook. So they’re all in there.

I participated in the CQ WW SSB contest this weekend, and managed 150 contacts for 49,385 claimed points. Not a big gun, but I am content. Here’s some pictures of my contest station:

From the outside:

And from the inside:

That sunscreen is a vital part of the station.

I uploaded all the contacts to my PHPHamlog, and my country count for DXCC now stands at 110, 11 new countries added in one weekend. I’m hoping that some of them upload to LOTW so I can get credit for them. I need 34 countries for basic DXCC.

WAS is also coming along, with Montana confirmed I now need only 7 states in LOTW for basic WAS. Next weekend is the ARRL CW Sweepstakes, so maybe I can complete WAS then.

After 48 years licensed, I am closing in on WAS. Here’s the progress:

The map doesn’t show them, but Alaska and Hawaii are confirmed.

As long-time followers of this blog know (okay, bear with me. Let’s pretend there really are long-time followers of the blog, other than me, that is), I sometimes have long (like 9-10 months) periods of no blog activity and little or no radio activity.

But this month has been very different. In the first two weeks of October, I have 65 QSOs in the logbook from 32 countries. Most of these have been on 10 meters, which sounded like 20 meters again today.

I expect to continue making 2 – 4 contacts a day on 12 and 10 the rest of the month, which will be my most active month ever. It won’t be the last, though.