A couple of quick photo stops

Amnicon Falls State Park in Wisconsin.




A couple photos of wild flowers in Bayfield County, Wi.






These were edited and uploaded quick & dirty from my iPad. I have no idea what to expect.

Once I got home Monday night I imported them with my Ubuntu workstation and ran the images through the UFRaw plug-in and Gimp. They look better now that I have edited them on my main workstation. Having not spent much time with Photoshop Express on my iPad I had the color saturation & highlights tweaked a bit too high and the images were a bit soft. I think that the iPad will work fine for quick uploads from the field. I needed a reference image for comparison which I did not have at the time.

Rain for Friday 7/1/2011

We were not home at the time but there was a big storm system that blew through the area on Friday. When I checked the rain gauge after the storm we had 1.25 inches of well needed rain. (The yard was getting pretty dry.)



I pulled down the historical radar image from:
http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/radar/

I was on the road with family driving towards northwestern Wisconsin at the time or I would have grab some photos or at least some different radar images.  --Oh well.

There was a fair amount of damage in the Meeker County area. Lots of large trees were either blow over or snapped during the storm. It looks like it was a mainly a strong wind event.

Field Day with K0MCR

In recent years I have opted to operate Field Day from a campsite sometimes operating QRP and other times QRO. Last year we operated from my dad's house on the lake in northern Minnesota. This year I had been working on plans for another camping & QRP effort. ---umm... until my son Ben (N2BEN) indicated that he want to operate Field Day and with one of the local clubs.

Since harmonic #2 showed some interest in operating the wheels were in motion for our Field Day 2011 plan.

Enter our friend Paul KC0HST. Paul knew that we were looking at our options and he steered us towards operating with the Meeker County group; aka: Kilo Zero Mike Charlie Radio - K0MCR


We setup a medium size army tent and a Lions Club tent at the Litchfield Airport. It was kind of an open operating event. We operated 4A+GOTA since we had people that were willing to bring radios and antennas that would support a 4A event. We borrowed some vertical supports and dipoles from N0FP to create some flat top dipoles at 45 feet in the air.

End to end that is about 160 long, it is holding a 40m and 20m dipole as shown in the picture. The antennas were awesome and i felt very loud while operating with them.













I still need to pull our official logs from the two main PCs but I took a picture with my phone at the end of the event Sunday at 1pm.
 
The 4A stats:

326 CW Q's
78 Digi Q's
528 SSB Q's
932 total Q's

We are pretty sure that is an all time high for this club.

Overall we had a great time operating at the airport. The food was great, the bands were good, the antennas played well, and the team work was a blast.

CQ FD CQ FD Kilo Zero Mike Charlie Radio FD

When time permits I will try to post some video from our Field Day effort

Station & Blog Tweaks

I spent some time today upgrading from CQRLog 0.96 to 1.1.0.  That was a pretty major behind the scenes upgrade because it changes the database from Firebird to mySQL. Over the updated was pretty simple. I added CQRLog to my software repository in Ubuntu and then it shows up in the add/remove programs feature. Another nice feature is that method of installing will also let the OS solve the install dependencies for files that might be missing. Another nice feature is that the future updates will be downloaded as part of the OS upgrade/patch management process. (My system checks for updated daily.)

I also spent some time working on getting Logbook of the World setup. I uploaded 2268 log entries (everything since we moved into this house in 2005) and had 707 matches in the system. Now that the encryption certificates are taken care of I should be able to upload & download LOTW from CQRLog on a regular basis.

Now that CQRLOG and LOTW are setup & updated I spent a few minutes looking at some stats and posted them to my blog:

Online Station Log

6m Grid Squares that I have worked

2m Grid Squares that I have worked

Someday I will automate uploading the station log.  --It is on the list of things to do, but you can guess how long my list is.

Finally as part of putting up some new pages on the blog & website I ran into a snag...  the new pages messed up the navigation lok & feel at the top of the pages. I spent a few minutes searching through the Wordpress docs and found out where the magic code is located.

Look in: header.php for string: wp_list_pages

Before:

 <!-- Page Navigation -->
      <div id="blackband_top_right">
        <h2>
        <ul id="dropmenu">
          <li class="page_item<?php if (is_home()) {echo ' current_page_item';} ?>"><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>"><?php _e('Home','grey_matter'); ?></a></li>
            <?php wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&title_li='); ?>
        </ul>
        </h2>
      </div>

Remove the line:

 <?php wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&title_li='); ?>

That resolved the issue with the navigation showing up on the header bar near the top of the blog.

73 de NG0R

Rain for the week

I think that we ended the week with about 1.8 inches of rain. We had 1.1 + .6 + .2 Sunday night through Wednesday. While it was grey through Thursday most of the rain was on Monday.

The sun is out today and the boys mowed the yard before heading to the lake to go swimming.

Monday rain

Some severe weather came through the area Tuesday afternoon. We got about .6 inches of rain in 15-20 minutes.





A rotating wall cloud was spotted in Wilmar to our west and some weak tornados in the northern Twin Cities area to our east.

Sunday night rain

Sunday night / Monday morning...

Looking at the radar we got an estimated .5 inches of rain. I will check the rain gauge later today. The forecast indicates that it should rain everyday through at least Thursday.

Update... I checked the rain gauge and it shows 1.1"

Rain for the week

From Tuesday 6/15 4pm thru Wednesday 6/16 4pm we had 1.5 inches of rain.

The 2011 June VHF Contest is over

The contest was an interesting event.  Once 6 meters opened up it stayed open for the most of the rest of the weekend. The higher bands like 144 -1296mhz had average to poor band conditions. Since 6m was open most people focused on that band which negatively impacted the amount of people operating on 144mhz and above.

Image of my temporary shack and operating position: 
(I hope to move to my new office later this summer)

The transverters and other support gear are located in the utility room.

I operated on a part time basis so I would estimate that my time commitment was around 10 hours.
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On the next set of images you can see which grids and bands were active.  I am located in EN25 as your point of reference on the maps.



50mhz QSO Map   (LINK to larger image)




144mhz QSO Map



222mhz QSO Map



432mhz QSO Map



902mhz QSO Map



1296mhz QSO Map


Looking at the maps it is pretty clear that 6m was extremely active and the rest of the operating event was a wash.  I could have  spent several more hours running in the contest on 6m but I decided that i wanted to try to work the local grids on the higher bands. I pulled the plug 30 minutes before the official end of the contest as 144mhz and upper were quiet.

Summary:  The band opening was fun but I would have preferred to work more local stations and across more bands.  I suspect that I will see a lot of QSO cards coming in the mail in the near future as my grid is somewhat rare.

73 de NG0R

6m opened, but 2m is still tough

I watched the opening move on maps until it finally got to Minnesota.



It is kind of fun running for a while and getting spotted on the clusters.


I also managed to work some DX this afternoon on 6m.



As much as I hate to walk away from the radio when there is activity on the VHF bands I need a break. I need some food and some time to stretch out. I think that I have 62 grids on 6m over the past 4 hours.

73 de NG0