Conditions

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

NEAR-Fest info, 160-6M OCF repaired and other stuff (SKED page audio work around)

 Well I guess it's time for another post.

NEAR-Fest:

Just reserved my spot for the Oct 15,16 NEAR-Fest . There are three of four of us that will man the table for the two days. If you come to NEAR-Fest, stop by to have your picture taken at the both and have it published in the Rag Chew.

By the way, I am looking for videos and picture that I can put on my laptop to display. If anyone has anything they want to share, I would appreciate it.

160-6M OCF repair:

After much back and forth with RadioWavz , I was finally able to order the coil that broke. I modified the connections a little to provide some strain relief to the connections. I am hoping between the strain relief, D rings and zip ties, it will hold up a little better. I will wait until sometime this fall to put it back up. Too many leaves on the trees right now.

Modified coil connections.

Operating:

As always working on the next level of awards. I have several band awards waiting to be submitted but just haven't gotten around to sending them in.

I have about 50 more Ts I need for Sx6.  Hopefully I can finish that soon.

I also have 138/150 points for my 2xQRP award.

I hang around the SKED page most days to see if I can help out. Not many people that could use my number ask for a QSO. I use to be all over people for QSOs when I was working towards Tx8 and Senator. Go figure.

SKED page audio work around:

I have noticed several people complaining about their attempts to post or PM someone being ignored. If you are using Chrome or Edge, the audio alerts don't always seem to work. I have trouble with PMs. When someone PMs me for the first time, I do not get an audio alert and I miss them quite often.

What I do to somewhat solve this problem is to open a second SKED page tab and then select the PM tab. There is no need to select someone to PM just the PM tab. What this will do, is to enable the audio alerts in the "everyone" tab. So when anyone post in the everyone tab, an alert will sound. Unfortunately, any post will sound so at times, you might get a lot of dings. Also any PMing you get will also generate an alert. I then can go to the first SKED page and can hear the alerts and see the messages.

This is in the category of "who would of thought?":

 I was recently reading a book about the life of a B-52 pilot.

 The Sluggo Chronicles: Memoirs of an Old Bomber Pilot. He mention a movie that was produced  by the Air Force that he was a part of while he was in pilot training. The movie is called "The Year of 53 Weeks" and is about what they went through during pilot training. He mentioned it was on YouTube.  What I didn't realize until after the video was over, is that it was put there by the US National Archives. It turns out the US Archives offers quite a lot of material on line.

Go visit and poke around for a while.

For you new guys:

The SKCC for intellectually challenged

All for now 73