Tag Archives: kb3ctx

May 23

2011 Dayton Hamvention

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Hey all, just got back in from the 2011 Dayton Hamvention. This year was an absolute blast and I would say attendance was much higher this year.

For our 2nd excursion to Dayton, we left on Wednesday morning to make the early Thursday morning start to Contest University (CTU) coordinated by K3LR. If you have never been, I highly recommend attending CTU. Much information is to be had as well as networking with fellow contesters but here and abroad. The material was fairly technical, although it applied directly to my operating methods and will hopefully help me work towards optimizing my time contesting. For the price ($50~$90) it was well worth the experience. More information including webinars are on their site http://www.contestuniversity.com/

Since Dave (NB3R) scored us Flea Market vendor spaces, we had to make the 7:30AM cutoff to get in the area to park. All three days consisted of 5AM wake-up calls, which I seemed to have no problem doing at Dayton.

More updates and photos to come later tonight.

73
–jeff
N3QO

Jul 14

Weekend update.

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This last weekend was a ham radio packed weekend. On Saturday morning I arrived at the club station (aka The Milk House) with 746 in hand and setup for the IARU HF World Championship. Dave, K3GMT; Howard, KB3RTB; and Ben, KB3CTX would also setup to join in the competition. Collectively as operators we knew we were far from any award winning experience, just the fun of competing.

By 9:30AM some of us were on the air, myself on 15 meter where activity was starting to build as the band was opening. Throughout the day I would eventually end up on 20 meter where I would find the DX chaos. Approximately 12 hours into the competition a large thunderstorm began to role in causing us all to take an unintended break. This would be the end of the competition for me with 102 QSO’s logged with approximately 7300 points.

On Sunday Laurie and I went up to Sussex county NJ to a hamfest where we put on a D-Star TV demo with DLARC member, Howard (KB3RTB) and a number of NJDSTAR members. A lot of attention was drawn around the booth as the first pictures were transferred. While there I purchased the parts to build a D-Star hotspot and picked up a Heathkit SWR/Wattmeter for Laurie’s rig.

Photos to come.