QST de N7GMT

Rexburg. Synonymous with cold. Seriously; don’t believe me, go look it up. It’s not really all that cold outside right now—a mere 30° F … but somehow it feels colder. When we got here on Wednesday it was 24° but it didn’t feel this cold. Must be all the turkey.

So we’re all up at Grandma and Grandpa’s for Thanksgiving. We left very early on Wednesday—so early in fact, that no one thought we had really left yet. I mean, really, we’re Snyders, for goodness sake. We never leave for a trip on time. Once in my youth, I think we were two days late. Yes, days. (more…)

<singing (poorly)> “And we’ll have fun, fun, fun, till daddy takes the paddles awaaay …”

KE7JSM called me up tonight and wanted to know if I was up for a little code practice. “Sure,” says I and we toodled off to 144.080 MHz, our usual local-CW watering hole.

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Well, they got after me and wouldn’t let me participate passively tonight for the local Morse code practice session. They teased and cajoled and mocked and brow-beat and … well, actually they just gave me a bit of a bad time.

You know, we’re not going to take your excuses of “Oh, I can’t find my paddles.” for very much longer. You can’t keep saying “I still need to get the wiring fixed.” or “I need to find that adapter.” And we’re all not-very-good, so you can’t use that excuse at all. You’re going to have to just jump in, so I’ll start and hand it over to Chris, and Chris will hand it over to you, then you hand it back to me, and we’ll just keep going until we’re done. [Did you see how smoothly he did that?] Now QSY down to frequency …

And that was that.

(more…)

So a bunch of guys from UDXA get together on one of the local repeaters a couple of nights a week and then drop down to the CW portion of the 2-meter band for a little CW practice. Tonight I finally remembered to tune-in in time to hear three of them head down for a practice session.

Oh. My.

If we had to use my transcript of the conversation, I think we would all get in trouble for sending what appeared to be codes and cyphers. Admittedly, when they slowed down enough (and sent things like their QTH twice … then I did OK. Even if one of them kept misspelling South Jordan.

I have a lot of work ahead of me.