"There's an app for that!"

 First, the Santa Ham image for the day:

The other day, I was reading the comics online.  "Pluggers' is one that I make sure to catch each day, and this one was published last week. 

One of the comments left by one of the readers was "I use the magnifying app on my phone for that!"

Of course, dense as I am and as far behind the times as I am, my mind immediately went "magnifying glass app? That's an app?" So I went to the Google Play store, searched for it and found one. Boy does it make looking at capacitor values and resistor color bands easy! Looking for solder bridges will be a piece of cake! And the app that I downloaded will allow you to capture a photo of what your magnifying, in case you want to reference the image for later - say a serial number or circuit board version or something like that. I find it a lot easier to use than taking a photo and then spreading your fingers apart on the image to zoom into it. The app provides a magnified image of whatever you have it pointed at, real time, in one step. So for those of you out there who may be as far behind the times as I am (which probably is no one), you may want to go to the app store.

The 40 Meter Fox Hunt was a bust for me last night. The foxes were K9DRP in Indiana and N1IX in New Hampshire. I was able to locate the packs of chasing Hounds, but heard nary a peep from either Fox. After a while, I even lost the Hounds.  With about 15 minutes to go, I shut the station down for the night. I know that's bad form and directly against my own mantra of "never give up", but I was tired and since the rain ended on Monday, it's gotten much colder and as a result, the basement much chillier.  Before shutting down the PC, I logged into the Reverse Beacon Network and put in N1IX's call sign just so I could see which was the Upper Fox and which was the Lower. From listening, I couldn't even tell. I see my two NJ Hound buddies WX2S and W2SH got into K9DRP's log. South Plainfield was an RF Black Hole again last night, it would seem.

While sitting there, straining my ears and twiddling my thumbs, I kept an eye on the DX Cluster on AC Log. I noticed that whenever T32TT, East Kiribati was spotted, I got a confirmed status.  For the life of me, I didn't remember working that entity, so I checked into it:

October of 2011, I worked that country on three different bands - and that was BKX3 - Before KX3. So that means I worked them with the K2 and 5 Watts as I didn't have any such animal like the KXPA100, either!  I think that was probably back when I had the G5RV up, so all the contacts were made either with the G5RV or the HF9V vertical.

On a closing note, you can't say the weather bureau doesn't have a sense of humor. They posted this to Facebook the other day and you have to read the Map Legend - it's hilarious!

72 de Larry W2LJ

QRP - When you care to send the very least!