Happy February!

Is it just me - or did January fly by like the proverbial bat out of Hell? It feels like Christmas was just a couple of weeks ago!

Before I bore you, a bit of Ham humor first (found on Facebook)

Secondly (the boring part) - I finished customizing Ham Clock thanks to watching K2CJB's awesome video on YouTube.

The upper left hand corner has my call sign and the local time. Next to that, the tile alternates between the sunspot number (above) and a picture of the sun (below).

To the right of that are the active POTA spots and then comes the latest DX Cluster spots. Getting the DX Cluster to work was a bit of a trial. No matter what DX Cluster I entered, it seemed I always got an error. Finally, I figured out that Ham Clock was looking for an "ON" command. As soon as I entered "SHOWDX" next to that prompt where I was getting a flashing "err", everything started humming. 

An interesting thing about the POTA tile/box - I'm not sure where the info comes for the content, but it listed a POTA activation that was NOT listed on the POTA app that I had running on the screen above the laptop. Maybe someone spotted it to the Cluster and not to the POTA app?

The final small tile in the upper right hand corner shows the current solar weather parameters. You can customize all the tiles by putting the mouse cursor in the upper left hand corner of the box and left clicking. A list of options becomes visible and if you select more than one option, the tile will sequentially display your choices. For me that's that first box where I alternate between the sunspot number and the solar image. The rest of the tiles, I chose only one option.

While I was monkeying around with this, I saw on the screen that Kuwait was on 30 Meters - 9K2NO. I figured "Why not?" and gave a call. It was a bit before I found the "UP" sweet spot, but I did get him in the log. Clicking on his call on the world map gave me his local date and time, his local temperature, and his latitude and longitude info in that bottom left hand corner "DX" box/tile/ Seeing that he had a nice 64F while I was at 34F was a bit depressing, but was neat at the same time.

It's not often you can get a Ham Radio accessory that you can describe as "fun" in and of itself. Ham Clock is an exception. It fulfills that yen for a Geochron at a fraction of the price and it's a neat and useful "toy".

And here's the best part. If I can get this up and running - ANYONE can get it up and running.

72 de Larry W2LLJ

QRP - When you care to send the very least!