[CQ TEST] I Had no idea that 10 Meters was so good! "What?!" you say, well that's because I have not heard 10 open for longer then a few hours in the 3 years I have been a ham. Yesterday and today the ARRL hosted the 10 meter contest and what a riot. Perfect conditions for this contest meant lots of state side contacts and a few other surprises as well. From DO21 I could hear most of the eastern seaboard as you can see below I have a graphical representation of my two days of "state hunting" for multipliers. Now lets not forget this was done all with QRP 5 watts so it was even more fun when I found myself making two contacts over 10,000 KM away! One in Argentina and one in Chile. I even heard a Japan station and one VK but the QSB was way to high for my 5 watts to fly not to mention all the contester pileups. It was a great contest and I am happy I finally got my beak wet on this band. Have a look below at my contesting / my log if you like.

Here is my graphic for contacts. Green is Saturday and Blue is Sunday. The red circle represents the "dead zone" where I did not hear a peep from all weekend. On average I was hearing serious 5-9s at about 3000km from my location.

[My log]

[CQ TEST] Just making a very quick post showing off my new shiney awards. Not bousting, I am just super pleased when I get paper in the mail anymore. It appears I did well in both ARRL 2010 sweeps and CQ RTTY 2011. Not many people operate QRP in Canada so I am sure compitition was not thick but I still love the fact little old 5 watt me gets some apprecation. And any excuse to put more Ham radio stuff on my shack walls makes me happy!

Here are the awards.

[CQP] So, it's been a little while. Too much going on in my life for recording any more tutorials but I have a few in mind. 1. How to setup N1MM 2. QRP 3. How to build wire-dipoles 4. Digital Modes.

This weekend I was a part of my favoite contest of the year. The california QSO party! Why this contest you ask? Well for a strictly QRP operator located in VE6  land (6 land) is very achivable, we seem to have the perfect pipeline to this area in Calgary.

I tried super hard to hunt every county but fell short by 8... Some of which I did not hear at all the entire weekend. Here are my results.

[QRM] The first series of tutorials is up on youtube. Parts 1&2 of "What in the world is WSPR?!" I dive head first into the world of weak signal propigation reporting and can be seen by clicking the links below, Enjoy. Eventualy these will be archived in the tutorials link at the top of the page.

Note these videos are best viewed  in 1080p and full screen.

[PART1]                                                        [PART2]

For the slides to this video please click [Here]

[CQCQCQ] Hey why don't you go ahead and book mark the site... it might not look like much now but soon it shall be primo! Press CTRL+ D on your keyboard.

Over the next few months I hope to develop this site for "hams" world wide. My hopes are to provide amateurs old and new with an "amateur" look into the hobby. What does that mean? Well to start I would like to make some tutorials on things I enjoy doing on the air, IE: Digital modes, QRP, Antenna building, Scanning. I will also be providing a blog about cool tid bits of DIY radio stuff I find out on the waves of the vast sea we call the internet. Stay tuned...