Editor’s Comments

First, we all need to congratulate our two club members Hunter, KC3VTB, and Tim, N3WAS, who passed their Extra exams and are now full fledged Extras.  Congratulations to both for passing that “interesting” test.

Their upgrades are just in time for some really good propagation.  With my 100 watts and my all band dipole, I have made contacts with India, Easy Kiribati, Lesotho, and Israel, all on CW.  With the new contacts I’ve moved my total up to 268 with 2 pending applications, and when I decide to pay the money, I’ll have 270.  I added two more I didn’t have that haven’t been uploaded to LoTW yet, Madeira Island and Lithuania.  So ‘ll have a 272 total as soon as the operators upload their logs and I upload mine.  And as I type this, I can hear an A6 station (A65HS) on 17 meters at about a S3 with some QSB.  

Checking over my awards on LoTW, I see that I have WAS mixed, phone and CW, but only 25 on digital. As you can see I will never get my “Triple Play Award” since there are few people on PSK31, most are FT8 or FT4  and I’m not set up for either.  So that piece of paper will probably never hang on my wall!

One thing about the Straight Key Century Club (SKCC) is their awards are free.  The certificates are downloaded and printed on your printer, but there is no cost for any except for the “Marathon Award” plaque, which is about $70, but then the plaque is not required and is optional.  My buddy in Tennessee has just qualified for his “Marathon Award” (working 100 QSOs of 60 minutes or more) and has already cleared a space on the wall for his plaque, his XYL helping him do the clearing!  But all of the awards I have obtained from SKCC have been free, WAS, WAC, DXCC, Ragchew Award (obtaining points for working people for at least 30 minutes), Prefix (something similar to CQ WPX), and Senator Award.  Just paid for the paper and the ink!  All the paper will make good fodder for the kid’s campfire when they clean out the radio shack when I croak!

Talking about propagation, think about working during the eclipse on the 8th.  There should be some really “interesting” propagation as the darkness falls on the land.  Might be fun seeing just where you can end up reaching.  Read more in the Section Managers column.