Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Computers in the SHACK

I am not a computer guy I do not try to talk the talk with guys that are really in the know. A friend of mine once told me you should have at least three good friends one with a pickup truck, one with a hot tub, and one that is a computer tech....makes some sense !

Most all of us today have a computer at our operating position, some are used for simple tasks such as spotting DX, logging , and others are used for everything from rig control to SDR. What ever yours is doing it is no doubt important to your Ham Radio operation. I fall in the middle spotting, logging, RTTY, CW (transmit) and PSK.

But the same computer contains all my everyday stuff too photos, records on line business things and so on....Well where I am going with this is that this week for the first time ever starting with a C64 I had a total system failure...yes a hard drive failure the blue screen of death....I am also a so-so backup guy some things I do often some not so....I guess that is half of us....

Well long story short after some cash layout and much fretting I am up and running with a new hard drive and some improved features to my Dell Windows 7 machine. I was sooo lucky much was saved from my old drive but some was lost forever my bad ! So if you are like me a so-so back up guy change your ways it can happen, and if you are the other guy who has always backed up faithfully good on you I should have listened once again my bad !

So the moral of the story is BACK IT UP I lost some things I will never recover, gone forever so don't be me...Get on have fun and oh yes back up you files....73

Sunday, December 8, 2013

160m

Well the WX here in Idaho is bitter cold was -6 this morning so good time for some warm shack time. This weekend was the ARRL 160m CW contest so thought I would give it a try with my 100 foot wire @ 25 feet and 100w ....yeah not so ideal but all I got !

Always surprised that it works at all, my high city noise and bad antenna are just a bugger but the idea is to have some fun and try to do better than last year, Well I had fun and did do better than last year, I ran the new FT-950 for the first time on 160 in high noise conditions, need to do some more setup so back to the book today, but was overall happy with it.

I think the East coast was hearing Europe better than the Western US, as I did hear many working EU stations. So good DX for my pewee station is East coast. Best this year was Alaska NY CT RI NH so that is good for me...I hope you are all planning at least one contest this winter, remember make the best of your situation get on and have some fun.