QST de N7GMT

We spent the weekend up at the in-laws. It was to be one of the last weeks of the open-house for the new LDS Temple in Rexburg (picture). The kids had an extra day off from school for Martin Luther King day, so it seemed like a good excuse to get out and visit family.

But there was a contest that weekend. Now, admittedly, I don’t normally make much of a fuss for Ham radio contests. I mean, I’m no contender, that’s for certain. But for some reason I decided that I was going to give it a go anyway. I couldn’t think of how I was going to get any kind of decent antenna up, and I certainly didn’t want to schlep my entire “shack” with.

With the hours-before-departure dwindling, I decided that I would take my modest collection of Hamstick-style antennas, my trusty Elecraft K2, and do my best. Oh, did I mention that Rexburg is about the coldest point in (habited) Idaho? I did take this into account as I prepared gear and clothing.

Shortly after the contest began, I bundled up and headed out to setup in the truck: trusty 12V gel-cell between my feet, K2 on my lap, 15-meter mobile whip whipping in the gentle Rexburg zephyr. After my feet started going numb from the cold, I decided that 15-meters needed some rest before I tried to find someone new. Well, lunch was calling, too. (Literally. My Sweetie called me on my cell to tell me they were eating. She wasn’t about to come out there in the cold to tell me, no sir.)

Tried to work a little 40-meter, but the band was just mish-mash from one end to the other. And no one could hear my pitiful 5W (yes, I was running frozen QRP on a mobile whip. Masochist, I know.) through the pile-ups.

Didn’t have a whip for 20-meters, but I brought along the trusty Radio Shack 102-inch stainless steel whip to see what I could do with it. I managed to get it to tune, with the help of the superb Elecraft T1 and made a surprising (to me) number of contacts.

Anyway, the total score was 20 total QSOs in 13 states (multiplier of 15 with three bands) for a grand score of 300 points. Pretty pathetic, score-wise, unless you take into account that it was QRP using a mobile whip, and I was freezing portions of my anatomy off—well, I would have been had I not taken precautions. (Hmm… seems to be pretty chilly here in the kitchen at, oh dear, 0320h local time). And if you scale my score to the 100W I would like to have been running, that would put me at 6,000 points, which isn’t at all bad. Maybe next year.

OK, so what if it’s the third of December; who’s counting? Other than my boy, of course. And my oldest daughter. It’s not like I promised I would put up the Christmas lights this weekend … <sigh> except that I did.

But it wasn’t my fault that we got four inches of snow. We never get snow in our part of town—well, almost never. If the benches and foothills get lots of snow, we’ll get a skiff. (That is indeed a word that can be applied to snow. It means “slightly more than a dusting” I think. Just ask Mark Eubank, the former weather man on KSL News.)

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I was reminded recently that there was an entry that wanted writing. Since it’s Thanksgiving weekend and the kids are in bed I might as well get it out of the way, eh? (Now if I were really on the ball, I would have a nice new laptop, with functional WiFi so I could sit in the living room with everyone else while I write this, but I’m an anti-MS curmudgeon, and it can be difficult to convince Linux and WiFi to behave themselves on old hardware.)

Anyway…

I read a post over at my mother’s site about men up on roofs. (Shouldn’t that be “rooves?” Oh wait, this is English; it’s not supposed to make sense.) No good deed goes unpunished, so I left a comment on her entry, which stirred up memories of a weekend not too far past.

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