Happy Canada Day !!!

 

A very Happy Canada Day to all our VE Ham Radio friends up north! The RAC is holding the annual Canada Day contest today. It's a good opportunity for many QRPers to try and get those harder to work Canadian Provinces in the log.

The annual 13 Colonies Event will be commencing soon, if it hasn't already. That will fill the bands for the next few days. I will not be actively participating, but it will be interesting to see if all 13 Colonies have a good presence in the CW portion of the bands. Of the several times that I completed a clean sweep, I think it was only once or twice that I got them all via CW. (Shudder! LOL!)

Here in the USA, we have a three day holiday weekend coming up to celebrate Independence Day. The weather has been wild and wooly over the past few days. It's been very hot the past two with temperatures close to the 100F (38C) mark along with high humidity. Last night we had quite the light show with thunderstorms closing in around 9:00 PM local time. This afternoon, into tomorrow morning, we have a flash flood advisory as heavy rain is expected later today. Then Friday and Saturday are supposed to be cloudy and showery. Sunday is supposed to be sunny and dry as well as Monday.

So where am I going with this? No, I don't want to simply bore you with weather details for Central New Jersey. But I'm thinking the weather is going to leave me with just Monday to get my Extended W3EDP antenna built and deployed. We'll be going over to my sister's house on Sunday for a BBQ, so that puts the kaibosh on getting it done Sunday. Although, I suppose I can actually build the antenna on Sunday morning before we leave and deploy it on Monday. If there's a break in the rain on Saturday, maybe I can measure out the 85 feet of wire I'll need. For me, it's a lot easier to measure and cut the wire outdoors than indoors. I usually tie one end off to a fence, unroll the wire to where I need it to be, as per the tape measure and then cut it. In that case, I can get the building part done on Saturday.

I want to move my mast farther back to the rear of my property as I cleared out all the overgrowth from my neighbor's yard while I was unemployed. Oh yeah - update - I'm back at work! Got re-hired at the same place I was before. I guess they didn't realize all that we had done for them, and it was like, "Get back here ...... quick!". Anyway, in the four weeks that I was off, among other things, I really got the backyard cleaned up from unwanted and encroaching vegetation. So now I can move the mast farther back. This will accomplish two things:

1) Make it less noticeable, which will please my wife to no end.

2) Make the wire more of a horizontal "L" instead of a weird variation of a "V". I suppose to RF, that doesn't matter, but it soothes my OCD.

Less than deluxe weather or not, I'm looking forward to the time off. Tonight, I'm going to get together with some SPARC members in order to compose and submit our Field Day results.

72 de Larry W2LJ

QRP - When you care to send the very least!