DXCC Milestone

Checked my LoTW account today, and discovered that I have just attained "5BDX2C" -- that is, at least 200 countries confirmed on 80, on 40, on 20, on 15, and on 10 meters. 

ARRL DX CW @ AA5B

Have you ever heard of a USA multi-multi DX contest operation using dipoles?  Well, that was the scenario at Bruce, AA5B's QTH this past weekend.  It continues the club trend of the past several years, eschewing big antennas in favor of well-made single-element radiators, both horizontal and vertical.  Results have been amazing in a points-per-dollar sense.  The NMBRC team, consisting of AA5B, K5TQ, KK6MC, KE5AKL and me, operated 2.5 stations to 2.26 million points, and the only yagi in sight was a little 3L 10 at around 30'.  The other antennas were all dipoles or verticals.  That didn't stop us from working 86, 94, and 106 countries on 40, 20, and 15 meters respectively.

K5TA QRV 17M

Took advantage of the nice weather this afternoon to put up a 17-meter dipole (@30') that I had cut and assembled last September (!) but not installed.  Seems to "work" fine (apologies to N6BT) -- flat SWR and ~30db better than my 40-meter dipole on RX.  Worked both 6Y5WJ and HC1HW on the first call barefoot.  I definitely need to hit the WARC bands to beef up my DXCC Challenge total, so, as the Bud Light commercials say, "(H)ere we go...."

NMBRC snags the gavel ... again!

It's official -- our club, the New Mexico Big River Contesters (NMBRC) has won the local club category in the 2012 ARRL Sweepstakes.  I don't remember exactly how many wins we have, but we certainly have had our share of victories in the past decade.  Preliminary results here.

K5TA.NET is live

I've finally started to work on creating a K5TA website.  Last September, Google Offers ran a promotion for BlueHost that sounded pretty good -- a year's hosting with basically unlimited everything, including a domain name, for $40.00 total.  I signed up immediately, but didn't do anything with it until recently.  About a month ago, around Christmastime, I started to experiment. At first I installed something called "WordPress," which is a fancy site creation tool, I guess.  It was too complicated for my tastes, though, so I deleted all their files (I hope) and just last week started to play with straight HTML/CSS.  I hate not knowing where stuff comes from or how it works, so I tend to regress to the absolute basics.  So, www.k5ta.net is up and running.  Not much there yet, but stay "tuned."

Well, Sweepstakes has come and gone for 2012, and it looks like our club has a good chance of repeating as gavel-winner in the local category.  I can't help thinking that we could generate at least two million points given a little more participation.  All it would take is 400K points each from 5 members, combining phone and CW.  That is easily doable from New Mexico even with minimal station hardware.

Well, time flies. I hope to start posting my radio-related musings here on a more timely and regular basis starting now. Stay tuned.