How I love hurricane season. That magical time starting in June and ending in November is a source of endless uncertainty each year. 2005's wretched abomination was followed by 2 years of relative calm, but this one has already been problematic. I haven't posted or updated the Hamfests This Week in a while due in part to having been on evacucation all last week for Hurricane Gustav. Now we're due back in the portion of the state expected to be affected by Ike this weekend. It's always an adventure, I tell you.

I recently wrote to the senators and congressmen for my area about the BPL issue and how it pertains to amateur radio and the current bill going through both the Senate and the House, Emergency Amateur Radio Interference Protection Act. Below is the only personalized response I received.

Ok so...yeah....I should have posted this stuff a long time ago. I finally snapped some pictures of the J-Pole AE5IR and I built, you can see them here. I recently redid most of the joints with solder vs plumbers goop. I seem to have done a decent job once I figured out that my small butane torch takes a bit to heat the copper to the proper temperature to get the solder to flow correctly.

I've finally gotten a chance to catch my breath post-vacation (funny how that works, the ironic need for a vacation after vacation). N5THX and I played a lot of radio last week. We got some copper tubing and built a super j-pole that I must admit worked like a charm. We mounted it on his mailbox and were able to hit a repeater 50 miles away with 5 watts, which I think rather surprised both of us. HamHoliday in Oklahoma City was a bit of a disappointment. It seemed as though it could have been a much bigger success than it ended up being, had it been, for example, better publicized.

As expected my vanity application was approved, still think the 18 waiting period to allow people to mail applications is silly, but still got the call I wanted woot!

Also Ham Holiday is coming up, one of the bigger hamfests in Oklahoma. I hope to find a good deal on a nice HT while there and meet some local hams since I am new to the community. Also AE5IR will be coming up to stay a whole and will be attending as well, he is going to offer his help as a VE to the ARRL team that will be doing the testing session there.

73 de N5THX ex KE5UKH

In regards to ke5ukh's previous post, I am also on identi.ca. follow me at identi.ca/robdgreat. In other news, I applied for a new sequential callsign, approximately 2 months after upgrading to Extra. So now I am AE5IR.

73,
AE5IR, ex. KE5TPY

I know there are a lot of hams on twitter that I follow, but with it's downtime(bleh), closed source (bleh), and an ton of features that are always screwed up I jumped on www.identi.ca today and it is so far pretty good for being open to the public for one day, it is feature lacking at the moment, but guess what? It's FOSS! Anyone can download the source and help out the project and make it better for everyone. This is one aspect of ham radio that has always appealed to me, how similar it is to the FOSS world. Check it out and while your there, follow me! www.identi.ca/palintheus

I also went to Field Day here for the Greater New Orleans area, a joint venture between the Delta DX Association (N5RU) and the Jefferson Parish Amateur Radio Club (W5GAD), where I also made my first HF contacts. I also hope to get a log, as while I only made about 4 or 5 contacts during the 15 minutes or so I operated on 20m RTTY, until the generator was shut off for refueling, the only call I remember was the very first - NU7DE, a naturist club in Arizona.

FIRST HF CONTACTS EVAR!!!

Went to the South Canadian Amateur Radio Society (W5NOR) FD setup hoping to talk to a few people and observe, what happened was that one of the seasoned members through me onto the phone station on 20m, I was nervous at first, but overcame it and wound up making about 40 contacts in an hour. Hopefully I can get a copy of the paper log section from when I was working, would really like to have a record of my first HF contacts, even if it was under the club call ;P

did I say w00t yet?

I applied for my vanity callsign yesterday and paid for it today. So now I get to wait the mandatory 18 days to see if anyone mails in an application and then they process it. Hopefully in a couple weeks it will be approved.