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…)

Two notable happenings, in my hammy world:

KB7QJC finally upgraded to a General Class license. His boys — and the rest of us, for that matter — have been after him for a rather long time, but the Morse code requirement was something he didn’t care to have to deal with. Now that it’s out of the way, he has upgraded. HF privileges! Wah-HOO!

The other gent who has earned my congratulations is currently KE7OVY, but will soon likely be K7BAN; he is the father of my buddy KE7JSM … who is also planning on changing his callsign, and has requested N7BAN. (Isn’t that cute? Father and son with matching callsigns. ) The thing that makes this so cool for me, is that ‘OVY — an old military radio copyist(?) — can copy CW like nobody’s business, even after … well, “many, many” years of letting his skills languish on the shelf. He unconsciously infected ‘JSM at an early age with a desire to get into radio, and now his son and I are feeding off each other’s enthusiasm. Besides, it’s neat to see someone else join the hobby, ’cause I know how much fun it can be.

So a hearty congratulations, guys!

(And ‘OVY-cum-’BAN-sr., we expect you to be upgrading to at least General soon, too; you already have the code down pat, and will have so much fun bumming around the world wirelessly!)

<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.

(more…)

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.