Whiskey Alfa 5 India Charlie Alfa

Too freaking cold and wet here to do any radioing so I’m staying inside.

Forecast says colder tomorrow.

The day didn’t seem like it was going to be good: listening on 12 meters yielded a few stations nearly in the noise with no one really standing out.

But as I was leaving the mall where I walk to try to lose weight (don’t get me started), I tuned down to the CW portion just to look around.

At 24892 I found a pileup rolling along in fine form. Tuning lower I found the station everyone was calling on 24891: E51MAN on Manihiki.

I listened as I was pulling out of the parking lot and set up the split on the radio so I could call him. There have been plenty of times I would drive home, pushing the button on the radio to send my call all the way, usually arriving home without a reply.

This time though, I sent my call expecting it to be lost in the swarm 1KHz up, and in reply heard “WA5?”. I sent it again and got “WA5ICA 599 TU”.

Later in the afternoon, with the help of friends at the K3UK sked page, I was able to work Mississippi and Nebraska to get closer to WAS. Now I just need Arkansas and Vermont to finish WAS. 1963 to 2011 and I’m down to just two states. (Were Alaska and Hawaii states in 1963? I can’t remember. It may have been easier back then.)

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.