Well it has been cold and when it is cold out and not much to do on the outside, I spend way more time playing radio and doing inside stuff… Such is the case for the past two days… I sent a note to some of my family stating that I had moved off center and finally got busy with some much needed “scanning” of genealogy works that we had collected over the years. My mother got interested in putting the family info together and located a family member that truly was doing “grass-root” genealogy work.. I mean she was hitting all the family for stories, going to locations to trace out documents and records that would lead to another place and so on… her work was shared with my mother many years ago and mom had it in some family books that were passed on to us maybe 3 or 4 years ago… Some of these I had copies from even earlier as I dabbled in genealogy stuff, but I just never got busy and had them all scanned and made into “electronic” versions that were much easier to share amongst family that wants to know…
So, yesterday and today I looked at those books that had been setting on my desk for several years and decided that I need to clean things up… get them scanned and posted… I do need, now that they are scanned, to go back and re-read many of the personal notes on some of my ancestors… seems there were Governors and Witches in our family… I think one was like the second Governor of the colony of Mass and some were accused of and confessed , then recanted, that they were Witches during the Salem trials… oh boy… Anyway I have done a little and have several more things to scan and get posted…
I have also been in and out on the radio… There is a big DXexpedition to Navassa Is… some small island controlled by the Us and made into a wildlife preserve… appears to be off the coast of Cuba, Jamaica and the Haiti but since it is protected there are no true inhabitants. You might guess that It is very rare for amateur radio operations off that island and there is a big section of our hobby that seeks out a collects such special contacts as these rare islands… according to some measurement it is the #2 most rare of all calls to make contact with operations on that island… (last operations were 22 years ago)… Well this expedition opened up this last weekend and boy has it been busy… has messed up all the regular bands for those in search of the most rare… me, not so much a chaser of the most rare but I have been listening and it would be neat to add to my lists but not imperative…
Now to my point… this has made a total mess out of my real focus of working my last two states on 160 meters… but tonight they weren’t tearing it up so I got on 160 but found very little activity there… I made a few calls and then all of a sudden I saw a call out of England… hum? so I responded and made the contact with G3VIR… for those not conversant in how difficult that was, imagine as kids we listened to the big AM radio stations … WBAP, KOMA, etc… I remember people saying that KOMA could be heard in North Dakota at night… and they were pumping out 50,000 watts to do that… wow… KOMA operated at 1520 kc… tonight I was at 1800kc… not too far up band and only running 40 watts and I made contact with England… Now if I can get to England , I should be able to get to Hawaii and Alaska? unfortunately… no one operating there when I am on and I am still looking for those contacts…
On another note, we made the wrestling match tonight… one thing was assured… the Cowboys would win… not because we are that much better than our opponent (although we are)… but we were wrestling the Cowboys of Wyoming… So no matter what the outcome the Cowboys would win… They were feeling pretty good about themselves tonight as they had just come from knocking off the other university down in Norman this afternoon… But we prevailed against a really good team out of Wyoming…
Tomorrow, we will attend the Men’s BB game against Kansas… I make no predictions on that as it generally is a rather close and heated game when we play them, even if they are ranked much higher…
WD0AJG