MIQRP Sprint

I totally missed the boat last night! I ended up working maybe, 8 or 10 stations.

First off, I missed the start time by almost an hour. Calculating UTC in my head; and taking into account for DST is something that should be old hat by now. I always mess it up!

I got on and by then, 20 Meters was starting to close; so I blew a great opportunity there. I jumped down to 40 Meters and was getting in a groove when I got the call that it was time to leave for fireworks.

The next town over, Piscataway (which I have mentioned many times here) always has their fireworks ON the 4th. Not early like a lot of other towns do. We went last night and camped out on the grounds of a company in an industrial park not far away from the high school where the event is actually held. The show was magnificent! I saw a lot of fireworks types that were new and that I have never seen before. The show started around 9:30 and lasted over a half hour and the Grand Finale was just that - grand!.

The traffic going home was relatively not terrible; but was still annoying enough. We got home around 10:30 or so; and I turned the radio on again but did not hear any "QRP TEST" activity. Oh well, at least I didn't waste the time doing something stupid - the fireworks display was well worth it.

After doing some chores today, I made a 44 foot doublet out of 24 gauge speaker wire as described at "Field Deployable Antennas". Pretty much the same identical antenna as the NorCal Doublet; but a little sturdier and robust. The ribbon cable used in the NorCal Doublet just feels like I'll break it if I handle it too roughly. Anyway, I hope to take this with me up to Lake George when we go up there later this month, along with my Black Widow crappie pole. I'm hoping to put it up in back of the cottage and leave it up all week, hopefully. Hopefully between this and the PAC-12, I'll get a chance to play a lot of radio this year and make a decent amount of contacts.

73 de Larry W2LJ