Summer fun and other stuff

Today I had my first test with the new equipment and a real expedition on air : CY9M.

How stupid can you be : I was convinced that this had something to do with Chile, or even better, the CE base on Antartica.  So this morning I was beaming SA and  I heard him calling but he was weak.... of course he was almost at the null-point of my beam...  This afternoon I tried again, this time with the laptop in the shack and N1MM running.   N1MM informed me that the good location was the other way up to Canada.  I turned the antenna, tuned to full power and the first call was a good one.  Indeed Saint-Paul Isl. is near to Canada and not an antartic base....   Stupid boy !  Thank you N1MM...  DXCC 285 is in the log.

A little remark : the lids + police heard on the band coming from Europe and Russia was incredible.  The poor operator was able to work only 1 QSO/minute and this also resulted in a cluster post : poor op, only 1 qso/minute...

This afternoon I continued to play in the shack.  Antennas to JA on 18 mhz and calling CQ with N1MM.
60  Japanese stations, some DU & HL and a few European stations were put in the log.  I've learned my lesson since Monday evening...

On Monday evening, we had only one laptop in the house and the XYL - also a licensed operator but not that interested anymore - wanted to surf on the internet.  So I went to the shack to do some holiday-style QSO'ing to the States.  With my qsl cards near to me, the plan was to make some contacts directly filling in the card.  No paper log, no pc.

Oh my God ! After two contacts a US station put me in the cluster and I had a pile-up.  I had just enough time to fill in the call, give 599 and take another card.  I worked 100 stations on this 'holiday'-style, but I'll never do it again without PC.  Sorry for all mistakes in the CW... even a 73 was like 74 and a few times I've sent OT1R instead of OT1A... too busy with writing my QSL cards...

This evening I was programming in VB in order to automate the process of the QSO flow.  Now I take the QSO's from N1MM and put them into my own logging program, send it to lotw and upload it to clublog.
During the last weeks this process took too much time and wasn't error-free.  Now it seems OK.

This week was also a good week for DX :  P29, A25, EL, ZS, ZL, T6, TO2D, FP and CY9 were added to the log.