25,000 Hits

I started this blog, the very last of 2008, as a way to encourage others to enter the ham radio hobby. I've been licensed for a little over 15 years but didn't get "radio active" until retirement. What a difference that has made....

My stat counter jumped to a little over "25,000 hits" this morning, and I get a good percentage of return readers. That's encouraging to me, and I feel I may have helped a few people to enter this hobby. There are SO many different modes of radio, and SO much room for fun. Morse code is by no means the only mode available to hams today. There are dozens.

I wanted to take a few moments and thank those that regularly read about my enthusiasm with radio and simple stations. It's nice to know you're listening. I'm sort of fixed on code at the moment and rarely use a microphone. But everyone has their "place" in this hobby.

As an example:

There's a little small caption on the current band-plan charts now. It states that CW can be used on any portion of the radio spectrum. Few take advantage of the "fine print" on the charts.

I awoke early this morning, around 2:30 am, and tuned into upper portion of the 40 meters CW band. There were a couple of SSB stations there. I switched to the SSB mode, set the radio in the "split mode"--with SSB on the first VFO, and CW on the second.

All perfectly legal since 7125 MHz was in my "general portion" of the band. (He could have been right in the middle of the normal SSB section too and it's still a legal transmission on my part). I tried several times to work F5VTY in Southern France (couldn't find the call in a data base) but he either didn't hear me, or wasn't a CW operator. I've heard several European and Caribbean SSB stations in this portion of the bands over the last several months.

It's a shame more SSB ops either can't, or won't, acknowledge the call sign of a distant operator using Morse code. (I actually dropped my membership in one club because of this) I don't think it's difficult to set the radio into a split mode using two VFO's.

I did it successfully, many years ago, on a 40 meter Canadian Maritime net. The net control operator called for any station, any mode, for check in's for the shipping net in Canadian waters and I jumped at the chance to make a contact with Morse code. He felt the same, and we were both elated with the contact. He got a real "kick" out of my QRP station being able to communicate with him and the other ships.

That little caption about CW use covering the entire radio spectrum can be a BIG deal under the right conditions.

Thanks again to all those who read this blog regularly, your're missing a lot of fun if you don't pursue this hobby. It's the greatest hobby in the world.