Monday, August 30, 2010

It may get wet

later this week - a lot wet!

It's too early to tell yet; and hurricanes are notoriously unpredictable, but it looks like Hurricane Earl might hug the Eastern Seaboard as it treks north this week.


Courtesy of AccuWeather.com

For more on Earl, you can go to AccuWeather.com.

On a lighter note, my bag of 12 fiberglass mast sections, which I got through eBay, arrived in the mail today. I haven't given them a good examination yet; but I can only wonder what the letter carrier must have thought. The olive drab bag is labeled, in official military lettering: "CAMOUFLAGE SCREENING SUPPORT SYSTEM WOODLAND/DESERT" with all kinds of official serial numbers and stuff. He probably thinks he's delivering to a survivalist or something. Next thing you know, I'll be put on some kind of watch list !!!! (Just joking!) Actually from when I served with Middlesex County Emergency Management back in the 1980's, I already have State Police and FBI dossiers opened on me from background investigations- so this would be nothing new.

Secondly, Jim W1PID posted another New Hampshire QRP outdoors story. You can read it here. These are always worth reading and really get the "Outdoors QRP" juices flowing! Truly, I think Jim has the outdoors "concept" nailed - his success rate proves this. A small transceiver and a wire, battery and key. I know for a fact that from time to time, I get too caught up in the trappings, worrying too much about the equipment and what to bring. The simpler, the better. KISS holds true to form here; and I think that's a lesson that I personally need to pay better attention to.

Last week, I got around to replacing the AAA battery holder in my AA0ZZ keyer that I got from the Four States QRP Group. The original that came with the kit kind of fell apart; or maybe I applied too much heat when originally installing it. The replacement that I ordered from Jameco arrived last week. I got it all re-wired and finally applied the decal that I made. By they way, that Inkjet decal paper works wonderfully! I highly recommend it.




Lastly, the next project will be to return back to my ATS3B and figure out why it's not working. I'm not sure I even remember from when I last worked on it so many months ago. I hear the "ATS-2" message in the headphones when I power it up. I also managed to calibrate the Reference Frequency Oscillator tonight to exactly 10.000.000 MHz. If I remember correctly, I had problems when I got to the Local Oscillator frequency trim step.

In any event, I am buoyed by the success I eventually had in getting the PFR3A to work. Even though I had a lot of help, I eventually got that to work; so I can probably get this to work - given enough time and research. I always have the ATS Yahoo Group archives to search for clues.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!

1 comment:

  1. Hi Larry, I got some of those fiberglass military mast sections. They are supporting my 84m loop in winter. Excellent and very strong. Hope the weather will not cause you too much damage. 73, Bas

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