Field Day 2015

I don’t recall exactly, when the last time was that I operated Field Day primarily from home. I haven’t had much setup at home lately, and have been involved with various club efforts for years and years. This year tho, I was “1 Dog from Alabama” – referring to the “1D” category of a home station using commercial power. I used this as an opportunity to exercise one radio with one antenna. I often have my tape measure tuned radial elements on display, but don’t get to use them much at home. I thought 40m was greatly improved. I use these on a Hustler 5BTV, with a Yaesu FT-897D. Conditions were good on 40m thru the night, worked nearly everybody that I called back to. I got good reports.
There had been some concern, that the recent solar storm might leave a mess, but I thought conditions were pretty good. I was pleased.
I worked only the 40, 20, 15, & 10 meter bands, SSB only.
I didn’t get in any hurry, didn’t even leave the house. Made about 50 contacts.

I appreciate N3FJP’s programs; n3fjp.com

I didn’t have a current version of http://n3fjp.com/fieldday.html, but a quick visit to the site, and an install – and it was registered and running. Shows me that ~40% of my contacts were on 7 MHz, but all together fairly well spread about the map. Hope everyone else had a good time as well.

52 contacts on a section map

Thanks for the QSOs…
/;^)

Happy Fathers Day

Father’s Day salute to Larry Sieg…

Them Ol Sieg Boys ..

The photo is from last October in David’s GapCreek ScanimateLab.
We have only aged slightly since then.

Thanks for everything Dad .!.
/;^)

SWL log from 1968

Turned up an interesting relic (while looking for something else, of course). I was in the 8th grade in 1968, and had use of a Hallicrafters S-38 receiver. Staying up late, the ionospheric ‘skip’ would expand to include Europe and I kept a log of different broadcast stations as I found them.

A page of my Shortwave Listener’s Log from 1968

I kept other notes as well, and often I wrote to the stations asking for a QSL card. I have found several of these as well – but they can go in a future post. Note the wavelength calculation, top left – to find the element length for a 18 MHz dipole… I think that was the antenna I had hanging from the ridge line of the attic.

What Fun that was.
Thanks  /;^)

Visio (in pixels) !!

For years I have suffered thru an absence of ‘pixel rulers’ in Visio.
I understand that a pixel is a screen concept, of different dimensions on various display screens… not going into that here. However, I frequently use Visio to construct various image files to fit into an exact space – and resort to using a 2nd program to finally scale my image file to the exact fit ( in units of pixels).

Apparently, in 2008 Noah posted on his blog (ComplexDiagrams.com) an article describing how to deal with this. Unfortunately it was years and years later before I found it (in 2014). But I did, and it works for me, and I will use it often.

A screen shot and quick explanation from Noah :

(from ComplexDiagrams.com)

Why it works Picas are 6 to the inch. By setting the ratio at 1:16, Visio presents a diagram at 96 picas per inch, the same as the Windows standard of 96 pixels per inch. You could set an appropriate ratio with any of the available units, but it works well with picas, and I find it useful that all units are labeled as p.

Thanks Noah ..!..  /;^)