Sunday, January 31, 2016

2016 Ham Radio Goals and January Retrospective

I've been doing some thinking about the kinds of goals I want for 2016, including my ham radio goals.  I dislike using the term "resolution."  "Goal" is a bit more apt for the situation.

So, here they are:
  • Get on the air with HF digital communications (especially PSK-31, WSJT, SSTV, Feld-Hell, etc.)
  • Earn my WAS award from my home QTH in northern Virginia
  • Integrate a rig control program and a panadaptor to my Elecraft K3S
  • Get to 850 SOTA activation points (I'm currently sitting at 690).  So, earn 160 points.
  • Generally, on days when I'm at home (not traveling), have at least one QSO per day.  I've been good with this thus far this year.
It has been a good January for ham radio.  I've installed a CC&R friendly antenna (A W1AB Killer Antenna installed into a tree--it's basically a 40 meter ground plane fed with 450-ohm ladder line and a balun near the transceiver and antenna tuner.)  I've had about 150 QSOs on both SSB and CW with 36 DXCC entities (to non-hams, read "countries") and 34 US states.  It's been great fun and a good challenge.  Getting those last 16 states should be pretty easy once I start doing digital modes.  Incidentally, I've really enjoyed working in the DX window of 80 meters (3.79-3.8 MHz.)  The W1AB Killer Antenna loads up just fine on that band and has given me some great results.  (Loading it on 160 meters has been a bridge too far so far.  I think I need to improve the counterpoise for that, and even if I did, it would be very inefficient, but still fun.)

I love this hobby.

No comments:

Post a Comment