Talked my wife, who has resisted getting her own ham license for years (in spite of being a solo backcountry hiker) into trying a practice test for the Technician license. She beat 50%, which is double what a random distribution of answers would be. She needed 8 more correct answers to pass. This is someone who has refused to study or even look at the material.
I'll keep up the fight, but EVERYONE who ventures further than their own neighborhood should get a license and carry a cheap radio.
@W6KME one of my initial inspirations for getting a license was because I like to hike in areas without cell phone reception. I took a HT on a few hikes but never heard a thing other than a repeater beacon.
If you want to be safe in the backcountry a Garmin InReach would be much better than a ham radio.
One of my clubs (CVARC, the one in Conejo Valley) Has a Morse Code Group. Last month we wrote Morse-themed Haikus. This month we played Morse Bingo. I love how entertaining the goofiest stuff can be.
I've met so many people since I had covid, most of my ham radio friends in fact. And most of them don't see me as disabled or sick or struggling. I recovered enough to do some wonderful things.
What they don't know is what I was before. That guy is gone. I was a world-class jazz trombonist. Now I'm maybe average, and the phone no longer rings. Now I carry piles of notebooks to record every thought in hopes of retrieving it later. The mental fight is all day.
I don't know how much of my memory was lost to the strokes, because all I can see are the holes. They're always there in my field of mental view. Just empty. I've cried a lot over the things I know must be in those holes.
I lost the ability to read music. I forgot morse code. I lost years of my past in chunks.
I'm very good at compensating, so people don't see all of this. I've learned how to produce events on a small scale. I have a lot of fun, and I love my life and the people in it.
My point is this-I am an incredibly lucky person. INCREDIBLY. Over a million Americans got as sick as I was and did not survive. I am surrounded by friends and family and world-class health care and research (mostly because I'm a valuable data point now, but they do try and help.) I am not complaining.
2 weeks with extra new breathing issues (already plenty of long covid issues, but looking likely I have RSV now too), so no SOTA activation for the Zulu new year Rollover. But 28 points chasing, and a ton of CW practice. I'll call it a win.
So it's Dodge this time, or Ram, or Stellantis or whatever you want to call them. Sounds like a big fine, but not when you realize it's about $1,670 per truck. They make loads more than that on each one. When fines are less than the ill-gotten profit, nothing changes.
Oh, Cummins says they were unaware, Ram will say the same thing, blah blah blah. And the Justice Department is letting them off without admitting any wrongdoing. This stinks.
Not one, not two, but THREE Chinooks working the #SouthFire at the moment, refilling at RSI in Fillmore. I'd love to go see the airshow, but I really do keep myself from driving into fire areas just for sightseeing. And I need to be at my station at zero-dark for the Santa to the Sea half marathon in the morning.
The Chinooks are converted by Columbia Helicopters and operated by Coulson. They carry 3,000 gallons...as much as the MAFS systems in the C-130s.
Found a box of 1.44MB floppy disks this morning...time to see if my Mavica camera can still camera. The one that stores as few as one photo on a floppy.
My most intense and fun Field Day ever, as FD coordinator for #CVARC (18A setup this year.) I lost count of the hours weeks ago. Hard to believe it's over now...it will take days to recover from my biggest post-covid effort.
No idea how our QSO tally compares to other clubs (because it's not a contest blah blah blah) but we obliterated our score from last year. I had some ideas for the site plan this year that seemed to work and can be made even better next year.
@W6KME@AE4WX I'm wondering if the issues we were seeing were part of the virtue of both my rig and the other rig sharing the same single conversion superheterodyne design, with an IF of 8.83MHz
@ai6yr@AE4WX Certainly possible, but I know the other rig needs some surgery. If it was just that, it woukd have shown up before the 23 hour mark, I think...
µFD is a monthly ad-hoc ham meeting I put on in Ventura County, open to all hams and clubs. Some months are sponsored by one of the local clubs.
It's a short 4 hour gathering to try stuff out and make sure that portable operation will be easy and familiar if you need it in a pinch. Most months we see 10-15 stations set up.