Titanic 100th Special Event

Last year I was privileged to operate from W4S during the 99th anniversary of the sinking of Titanic. My daughter Amber (callsign pending) got a chance to operate and even earned herself a QSL card from our friend Jim, N4UHZ.

This weekend, the Titanic museums in Branson, MO and Pigeon Forge, TN will commemorate the 100th anniversary of this solemn occasion with a special radio event. W4S and W0S will be on the air this weekend to give hams the opportunity to contact the Titanic museums and receive commemorative QSLs for the contact.

I plan to be there in Pigeon Forge Saturday evening around dusk to operate one of the planned 4 stations. My family will be with me (I hope) and help operate. Everyone is welcome to attend and operate.

If you can't attend, be listening for us on the air. I plan to tweet my operating frequency so that everyone can at least try to make contact.

The frequencies planned are:

• 3.950 80 Meters
• 7.220 40 Meters
• 14.265 20 Meters
• 21.350 15 Meters
• 24.940 12 Meters
• 28.350 10 Meters

There will be CW but only during the overnight hours (I don't know why it's restricted).

Here are some other radio events planned to commemorate Titanic:

• Chatham Marconi Maritime Center - KM1CC - Thursday 8AM ET to Sunday 8PM ET
• Several operating from the UK
• Marconi Radio Club of Newfoundland - VX9MRC 507.77 kHz - 0001-0400 UTC 15 April.
• Wiregrass Amateur Radio Club - W4AVM - Friday to Monday
• EI100T 
• Titanic Historical Society - W1MGY -  1400Z - 2030Z from the 9th to the 15th
• Radio TV Museum - W3R - 8AM-8PM ET Saturday

If I find more I'll update this list this week. If you know of a special event please leave a comment.

TWIAR comrades: Together at last...

I've been affiliated with TWIAR (This Week in Amateur Radio) for about 15 years now (my God, has it really been that long?) and what started out as a site for posting an audio file or two has turned into a big-time partnership with George Bowen (W2XBS) and a plethora of other folks over the years who have come and gone, or stuck around in some fashion or another.

Last year while visiting Iowa, I took a day and went to the Council Bluffs / Pacific Junction area and hooked up with Dale Sargent for the day. Back around 1998 I think, I met up with a former anchor of TWIAR (who I just found out moved to middle Tennessee this year), and the only other person I had yet to hook up with was George.

That changed last week.

He called up about three months ago to tell me he might be coming to the Chattanooga area to attend a wedding and was passing through town on the way. I decided to take the opportunity to look up some repeaters and send him as much info so that we could hook up on the radio while he was here. We also made plans to get together at least one day while he was in the area.

As luck would have it, he was able to make it down and so we finally met last Monday and it was our first "eyeball QSO" of (hopefully) many.

We spent the day swimming in the pool at their hotel, talking about the past, present, and future of TWIAR, and just shooting the breeze about life, the Universe, and everything.

As I guessed, my elder daughter hooked up with his, my younger one with his younger one, and the wives went off into their own world. One thing about my daughter Amber, she will have never met you before, grab you by the hand, and say "CMON!!" and take you wherever she thinks they need to go...

We were there until 11ish, just lost in time talking about everything possible. We had an enjoyable time at a Cracker Barrel and just enjoyed getting to know each other after all these years. When all was said and done we trekked back to Knoxville, and he headed home on Wednesday.

We've already made plans to hook up again should they make their way down or we make our way to the New York area.

In the meantime, we're talking about a revamp of TWIAR. Not sure what we want to go with or what theme would work best, but we'll basically have to start from scratch for most of the content when it does occur (and time is not always a luxury).

Speaking of the kids, Lauren's trying to get on the radio a bit more but everything else just gets in the way. Hopefully there will be more kids getting on the air that she can talk to.

Speaking of kids...do I have a yarn to spin (making it a separate post) about adults talking to kids on the radio...stay tuned.

Adventures in Zero-land

There are some things I wanted to do before I left this world, and traveling to the midwest was one of them. Given, I was intending to go storm-chasing, and considering that it was just visiting my sister-in-law's home, and still "tornado season" in the midwest, the chance to go to Iowa was too good to pass up.

My sister bought and flipped a 120-year-old home in a little town south of Des Moines called Truro. It would take us 16 hours to get out to the house in question. I spent 4+ days getting a dual-band radio installed so that I would have some radio time while on the way to and from Iowa. The big question I had was, would anyone want to talk to me?

I must admit, getting a contact on a repeater has been a bit of a challenge in recent treks around the southeast. When the mobile was installed in the minivan, I often spent countless hours looking for contacts on repeaters and simplex to no avail. Trips to Myrtle Beach, Winston-Salem, Huntsville, Ft. Walton Beach, and Nashville were often met with silence, no matter if it were the middle of the day or the dead of night. I even took my FT-530 to San Diego last year and wasn't able to make any repeaters anyplace. The ones I were able to hit, no one would answer. I wondered if I was even making it in to the repeaters but I guess I'll never know.

So we embarked upon our journey around midnight on a Thursday night/Friday morning. We picked up my sister-in-laws friend who lives in Iowa and we all rode up I-75 towards Lexington, KY.

I spent most of the first couple of hours talking with my friend Jason, KF4VDX on his repeater, then we moved to a repeater in Petros (NW of Knoxville) and linked to a repeater in Williamsburg, KY. He came in on one repeater, and I talked with him on the other. About an hour north of the TN/KY line, the repeater faded in the distance and we had to end our QSO. At one point in time some years ago, we probably could have continued on using the FARA linked repeater system, linking KY, OH, IN, and MI. There was a repeater in Knoxville that was installed to the linked system, but it only lasted a few short months before a storm took out the link from Knoxville to Kentucky. We decided we would try Echolink if possible while in Iowa.

Overnight, the drive was lonely, broken up by conversation in the car of ghosts and ghouls, and it was conveniently told to me that this house we were going to be staying was reportedly HAUNTED! So we passed the time telling one ghost story after another, and sure enough I wasn't going to sleep at the wheel...

The night was quiet, and I tried several repeaters in the Lexington and Louisville areas as we trudged north and west. We stopped a couple of times, between Louisville and Indianapolis. And about an hour before Indy, I tried 146.700 and struck up a conversation with K9NQW. We chatted for a while, discussing the usual banter new contacts tend to discuss. I would later get a QSL card from him after I returned home, and it was a very pleasant surprise. I just replied back to him this week with my own QSL card, something I haven't done in a couple of years.

After we by-passed Indy and its Friday morning rush-hour bedlam, (we arrived around 7AM Eastern time) we got on I-74 going towards Illinois. My wife drove as I dozed off and on (I don't sleep very well in the car) so the radio was quiet as she and my sister-in-law's friend chatted.

At one point on the drive near Peoria, I was tempted to head a bit further west towards Macomb, IL. Some friends were down there, but it was unannounced, and I hadn't heard from them in some time, so I wouldn't know where they lived. Still, it was tempting to take a trip and see if their LPFM radio station was still on the air. However, time was getting the better of us, and we continued onwards towards Davenport, IA.

Between Champaign and Peoria, I stuck up a QSO with three hams (their callsigns escape me, and the notepad I wrote them down on went MIA) in the area. They were very helpful, telling us about traffic issues, talking about other hobbies (one was into bicycle riding and spoke of wanting to bike the Smoky Mountains) and recounting war stories of QSOs long past. It was also the first storms we encountered in this area. It was unique to be able to watch the storms from several miles away, as opposed to having the horizon obstructed by mountains and rough terrain as we would in Tennessee. These storms were not severe, however, so no storm chasing for me to embark upon as a detour to the monotony.

The showers were brief, and we continued on towards Iowa. We passed Knoxville, IL on the way to Davenport, but couldn't stop to take a picture due to construction in the area.

Along the way, I sent messagea to my Twitter account to see if any hams would try to contact me while I was on the way to Iowa. I'd send my location and repeater(s) I was monitoring. Unfortunately, this experiment was all for naught. No one mentioned my Twitter page when talking to them. But considering that I was having many QSOs as it was, Twitter probably wasn't necessary anyways.

When we crossed the Mississippi River into Iowa and interstate 80, I found another ham on a repeater in the area. As we talked we passed an airport, and I instantly recognized "Fat Albert", the Blue Angels flight team's support plane. I was told there was an airshow that weekend, and the Blue Angels were the main event. We discussed returning on Sunday for the airshow. Unfortunately we were not able to make it.

During the trip, my wife would thumb through the Repeater Directory and read off whatever repeaters were on 2m and 440 in whatever cities showed up on the signs along the way. I was surprised that a great majority used tone access. Back in Knoxville (Tennessee, that is), tone access was almost unheard of. So few repeaters employ tone access in the area. (NOTE: As I wrote this, I checked and found that Iowa repeaters were mandated to have tone access in 2007). At one point in 2004 SERA (the South Eastern Repeater Association) attempted to mandate tone access, and I was one of many who cried foul. My biggest complaint was that in times of emergency we may not have the luxury of trying to figure out the tone of a repeater as we're trying to access it for any emergency traffic. I was aware many areas were using tone access to curb interference (intentional or otherwise) but I guess back home we're just a tad different. In fact, one group of folks tried to get East Tennessee repeater owners to secede from SERA and start their own repeater coordination body. While I sympathized with the breakaway repeater owners, I didn't necessarily support the idea of a new coordination group, but I wasn't a repeater owner, just an avid user. Eventually, SERA backed away and decided to wait until a later time to "re-evaluate" the policy with more input from repeater owners, and not just a few coordinators trying to speak on their behalf. The storm eventually died down, but I think a lot of damage was done and interest in SERA waned for a time. I have yet to renew my subscription to their journal, though I need to get another issue soon.

Back to the story, though. After we had a late afternoon lunch/dinner in Newton, near a new Iowa Speedway, we started to get excited as we were finally closing in on our destination. I didn't expect the drive through Iowa to be so long. It's much bigger than I expected. The radio was quiet through Iowa City and Williamsburg.

When we got near Des Moines, we hit a severe thunderstorm and an absolute torrent of rain, the likes of which I have not encountered in years, both in duration and intensity. It made me thankful for putting on new tires just a couple of months prior (at $700 no less!) as we hit some of the worst storms I've driven through ever. One of the repeaters in Des Moines (146.820) was designated as a SKYWARN repeater, and as we tuned in, I heard the National Weather Service liaison chime in with weather warnings and bulletins. I didn't dare key up, fearing I'd get a major ass-chewing by someone thinking I was a rookie, despite my having been SKYWARN net control and conducted hundreds of nets in the past. But, after a lengthy period of quiet, I keyed up and requested info from NWS on the path of the storm in relation to my destination. Silence. No one, not even NWS would come back to me. And I know I had the right tone set in, and was 50w into the machine. But whatever the reason, no one was willing to talk to me. As it turned out, I attempted to use this repeater 3-4 more times the week we were in Iowa, and not once did anyone answer me back. This was the only open repeater that I encountered where the locals were not talking.

We arrived in Truro and the rain had been pouring in this little town. The streets were flooded, and the homes on both sides of our place was flooded and running past our house's driveway to the nearby runoff creek. To make matters more interesting, after the rain eventually died down, as I'm trying to unpack the Trailblazer, the nearby tornado siren begins wailing! I joked with my mother that I would chase tornadoes while out here, but now I'm thinking I'm the hunted one!

As it turned out, the siren was signaling the local volunteer fire department into action. Apparently something caught fire from a downed powerline or something. Still, it took me a few hours to reclaim my wits about me.

The next evening I took the family to Knoxville (Iowa, that is) Raceway about an hour east (taking the highways and even a gravel road or two). I'd never been to a sprint car race before, and figured we'd take in the best one in the country. On the way there, we hit up a 440 machine and I had a 10 minute QSO with a guy on his way to working security/bouncer duties downtown in Des Moines. It was a nice way to pass the time as we travelled the highway towards Knoxville.

When we neared Knoxville, my wife looked up the one repeater in Knoxville and found it to be closed. I tried to key it up and it did not reply with a carrier. I decided to do a little snooping and found the tone for it. I know, I probably shouldn't have, but what would it hurt? I'm just some hick from Knoxville (Tennessee, that is) who doesn't know any better, right? The worst I figure is I'd be shooed off the machine. Well, not even THAT happened. I keyed up 2-3 times and gave my call ("K-4-H-S-M, mobile Zero") and got no response. Either no one really was listening (closed repeaters back home tend to be vacant) or they weren't caring to talk to me. Not even on the return trip back to Truro would I get an answer.

On Sunday, I got into another repeater on 2m and struck up a QSO with another ham as we made our way to a museum some hour NE of Des Moines. He was pleasant to talk to, though again his call and name escape me.

I began to realize that the area was chock full of enthusiastic hams who were very friendly and helpful to this 4-lander. I often wonder if I just wasn't hitting the right repeaters back in the southeast when trying to bring on a QSO to pass the miles.

The next day, I went to 6.52 simplex on 2m as we made our way towards Winterset, IA (home of the famous bridges of Madison County and birthplace to John Wayne) and I was stunned when I got an answer from Mark, W0ISF. We talked on simplex, then he invited me to his repeater. If his callsign rings a bell, it's used every year for the Iowa State Fair special event station (going on now as this is published). I would end up talking to Mark 2 more times, including our leaving to return home the following Friday morning. I thanked him for his hospitality and hoped I could talk to him during the fair. As of now I haven't heard them (listening to 20 meters mainly) but I will continue to try.

On Tuesday, I traveled to Western Iowa to see my friend Dale, N0WKF (file guy for TWIAR) for our first eyeball QSO. On the way, again, a couple of good hams talked to me. I tried to reach Dale on his repeaters but he wasn't on the air listening for me. It was great to finally meet him. We stayed for about 3 hours and then visited Council Bluffs before heading back to Truro for the evening. The trip was spent off the air, though, as we were drenched from a sudden shower while on a pedestrian bridge over the Missouri River separating Iowa from Nebraska. I was partly pissed from being soaked, and partly afraid I'd short something while talking.

The journey back to Knoxville, TN was made going south through St. Louis and unfortunately I wasn't able to make any contacts on the way back home. As I approached Wentzville, MO, outside of St. Louis, I tried to find a repeater to raise Vern Jackson, WA0RCR, another TWIAR contributor with the Gateway 160 meter net report. Unfortunately no repeaters were in Wentzville, and I didn't have 160 meters in the car to try. Although that would be a great trick...

Traveling through St. Louis (with a visit to the arch) was a first for me, and traffic was certainly not going to give me any breaks this Friday afternoon. I endured heavy traffic, and although I heard a few QSOs as I scanned the 2m band, I had to drive first, talk later.

After we left St. Louis, we got stuck in traffic, and no real way to pass the time for the 90 mins other than drive/stop/drive/stop. I tried a couple of repeaters on 2m and 440, but no one was there. My concentration was spent on trying to find a way back the other way for a detour anyways, but the two spots where I could turn were Government vehicles use only, and the cops were watching them. I saw people pulled over after making the U-turn, and figured I'd be a sitting duck with TN tags.

After the jam let up (construction that either never occurred or completed for the day while we were stuck) and we had dinner, Jes drove from Illinois down thru Paducah and into Tennessee, but I didn't use the radio. I'm not a good passenger. That's all I care to say about that part of the trip...

Back into Tennessee, I hit the Cumberland Plateau past Crossville and called to Jason, KF4VDX, and sure enough, he was there, almost like he was waiting for me to return. Although I had a great trip out west, it was nice to hear a familiar voice again. He talked me back to the house and my trip officially ended around 2am (Eastern Time) Saturday morning. In just 12 hours, Field Day would be underway, and he and I would try to work it both from his home and from a club outing in Maryville.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at the warmth and hospitality both on the air and in person from people all over Iowa. My sister-in-law's house was officially sold 2 weeks after we left, so we won't be able to go back there for "free room and board" next time we go out there. But it made such a great impression upon us, we know there will be a next time.

BTW: No ghosts bothered us while we stayed there. And if I find that sheet of paper with the names of everyone I talked to while out there, I'll add them to this post. If you're one of them, email me.

My daughter's getting closer to getting her license + other tidbits to catch up on

Just an FYI, my older daughter, Lauren, has finished studying the question pool, and is now working on taking the practice tests on QRZ.com.

I'm also going to post about my trip to Iowa from June and installing my radio for that trip. They should be posted early next week.

I'm heading to Dayton, OH this weekend for a wedding, so I may be able to make some QSOs while in the area. I'll only be up for the weekend, so there won't be much time to enjoy the trip.

I wish I knew what was up with FARA. Their web site is dead (has been for several months) and when I tried a couple of their repeaters last month going to Iowa I couldn't raise them.

BTW: It looks like the Mt. Mitchell repeaters got a 1-year reprieve from the radio station that wanted to kick them out. It will hopefully give them enough time to either relocate the repeaters to another tower on the mountain, or convince the land owners that amateur radio is worth keeping around the mountain.

I was talking to a ham in Chattanooga 2 weeks ago who told me that several repeaters north of there between Chattanooga and Knoxville got evicted from their towers after a SNAFU involving a new owner of the towers and the contact information being lost. One of the stories I was told is that the Park Service was even cut off, and within a few minutes of going off the air, a Park Ranger arrived at the tower site and demanded to know what was going on. The hams who were running one of the repeaters cut off were also there, and witnessed the Park Ranger threaten the tower climber with arrest if he did NOT restore service ASAP. The tower guy didn't know what to do, because he got an order to remove the equipment, and was gonna go to jail if he did.

Sometimes I wish amateur radio had that kind of clout.

It looks like they got things cleared up with the Park Service real quick. However, the amateur repeaters (as many as 10 or more if I remember) are still off the air until a new contract is worked out.

It also looks like the English Mountain repeater came back to life recently. It had been taken off the mountain several years ago after a tower collapse that forced the land owner to require a fence, insurance, and other amenities that basically forced the repeater off the mountain. The repeater's owner, Sam Kirby, WB4HAP, passed away unexpectedly in 2007, and the future of the repeater was in even more doubt. However, Tim Berry, WB4GBI came through, returned the repeater to English Mountain, and once again, the activity is making a renaissance.

It may not match the activity of it's peak in the late 90s, but there's only one way to know for sure.

And what the heck is up with Radio Shack dropping "Radio"? Is it just for advertising, or permanent? I have money on this being a marketing test, to see if the public responds in waves to the impending onslaught of advertising and marketing in advance of the Christmas season, and if even remotely successful, "Radio" will be permanently removed from the name of the store.

It will probably work the same way Subway did those $5 footlongs. First they were "for a limited time" then it became a constant fixture on the menu due to the popularity of the promotion.

To me, it really ceased being "Radio Shack" when it stopped selling ham radios, focusing on scanners and CB radios instead. Hams are people too, dammit! Then they concentrated their market towards satellite TV and radio, cell phones, RC cars, and batteries. They did score with SAME weather radios, but now most any store sells them, and for less.

They did earn points when they had PL-259 barrel connectors and an 8-pin mic plug I needed to solder up a mic to my ill-fated FT-5100 radio (more on that in a future post) but overall, you ask an employee a technical question, and unless they're a ham themselves (and a few are), you get the deer in headlights routine. Any more it's hit-or-miss with your question. You got questions, they got answers half the time...

Off to bed, and off to Dayton.

Merry Christmas

I haven't been updating the blog because, really, there's not a lot going on at the moment. Lauren's still learning ham radio, but school took precedence and we're going to do some studying while she's on Christmas break.

Have you ever noticed that the HF bands seem to pick up on Christmas? I got on 10 meters briefly at 10PM Christmas night working a station in Kansas! 10 meters hasn't been much of anything but almost every Christmas, I get a "Christmas miracle" on HF. Two years ago, I worked 3 new countries on 20, 2 on 17, and even got a brief opening on 15. Last year, I worked 17 meters for about an hour, and even worked Australia...or was it Austria? I get those two confused...

10 meters wasn't open for long, though. I went upstairs to try and get the kids off their new Nintendo DS's (courtesy of Santa, who's now broke, mind you...) and into bed, and when I returned the band went quiet.

It seems even in the worst band conditions, the HF bands always seem to come open, even if only for a few minutes. I even heard some 2 meter sporadic E on a couple of repeaters. If I'd had my 2m sideband working I'd have given it a shot.

New Year's day the family's all going to Myrtle Beach for a few days. The last trip to Myrtle Beach, I heard the NWS...from Melbourne, FL! Hopefully I'll be able to work a station or two this time around on my HT.

Enjoy the rest of the holidays, folks.

Back to California

San Diego bust and Houston, we have a problem...

I returned home from San Diego last night. It was definitely a trip I won't forget anytime soon, especially since it looks like I'll be making another trip out here about a week from now.

I tried in vain to chat on any of the San Diego repeaters I could hear. I listened to the nightly net and participated in spite of my lack of warm reception. I didn't bother emailing the answers in, as I was not in the mood to be snubbed.

I plan to go a little more prepared next time. I'll try to research the area's repeaters a bit before I head out. I also plan to keep my repeater directory in my carry-on bags. While returning home from San Diego, we had a 2-hour layover in Houston which turned into almost 5 hours because of mechanical issues disguised as "fallout from Hurricane Dolly" when I asked the counter agents. While in Houston, I passed the time with my FT-530 and tried to bring up something...ANYTHING in Houston, and could not key up a single repeater on 2m or 440. I didn't know if there was a tone on any repeaters, so I tried a few. I scanned around with my Radio Shack scanner and got nothing on 6m, 2m, 220, and 440. It was DEAD for a Friday night...in Houston??? I ended up passing the time scanning the Bush Intercontinental Airport frequencies and listening to air traffic.

A trip to San Diego might be a dream for some, and I did have a good time while out there. But it's definitely not something I look forward to returning to in a week's time. Mainly it's the job I'm doing, but also the fact that I'm gone for two weeks straight. It stretches my wits to no end to be out for so long. Not to mention the fact that school is starting up in about two weeks for my girls, and I look to be missing that while I'm away.

This is an opportunity for me to improve myself where I work, so I have to go. I just hope I can keep from snapping and ending up live on San Diego TV in a high-speed chase that ends up on TruTV sometime in the near future...

Hopefully my repeater hunt will be better next time. I'll be a little further north in a place called Del Mar, and I'll have some co-workers with me as well. I hope I can complete at least one while I'm on the road.

Dale, our trusty TWIAR file uploader and audio guru and bandwidth hog, is out of town this weekend and unable to upload, so I'm doing that right now as I type this. I don't have the pipelines like what he has out there, so it takes more time to upload. They should be good to go com Sunday morning.

Live from San Diego

One of the things I always wanted to do was visit the West Coast and touch the Pacific Ocean. I honestly thought I wouldn't have that opportunity anytime soon in my life. Especially these days with gas prices and skyrocketing fares on travel really put that thought in the backburner of life.

That infamous "rainy day", we keep saving for always comes sooner than later, so trying to save up for a big trip usually ends in trying to keep my house, car, kids, or me tuned up.

So I come into work one day and get called into my boss's office. My first reaction is typically "what have I done NOW?" to warrant a trip to the principal's office. Needless to say my reaction to "We may have to send you to San Diego for training" was a shock to the system.

I won't bore with details, but I'm in the home stretch of a nearly two-week stay in San Diego, specifically La Jolla (pronounced "lah-HOY-yah") north of the city, next to the golf course Tiger Woods recently competed against Rocco Mediate, bad knees, and the odds to win the US Open. I took a late night walk Friday night on that course over to the coastal cliffs overlooking the Pacific and watched the ocean. Absolutely amazing.

Emotionally and mentally I'm exhausted, though. And I still have 4-5 days to go before I can head eastward on that jet aeroplane. The fact I have been away from my wife and kids has really taken a toll on me. But I suppose it takes this kind of event to realize what's important in my life, and my wife and kids are having it just as rough. It always breaks the heart to hear your kids cry because they miss daddy.

The California life is definitely unique and a place I recommend visiting at least once in life. The thing is, I may be coming back out here again real soon.

I have seen the vast scope of San Diego in the relatively short time here. I've witnessed beautiful sunsets, amazingly beautiful weather, amazingly beautiful women, fog and more fog, parasailing without a motor, the San Diego Silverman, expensive prices, wonderful Italian, Mexican, and fast food, a nude beach (no, I did not strip), a gay pride parade (NO, I DID NOT PARTICIPATE!), the San Diego Zoo, and a trolley tour through many parts of the city.

I arrived last Monday, but it wasn't until Friday night that I took out my FT-530 Yaesu and tried to scan the area for repeaters. 2 meters is a bust. I can hit some repeaters on Palomar Mountain, but can't tell if anyone can hear me. No one answers back. I tried a repeater link system on 448.900 (An unusual repeater pairing for me to experience) and could not get in. It is either toned to where I cannot get in, or I'm just not making it. They have a nightly "late-night" net at 11PM Pacific which has a trivia question quiz and I participated by sending the NCS an email with my trivia answers. I sent an email detailing my plight for not making it in to the net and my answers. I got a one-word response: "OK". Not exactly friendly, if you ask me. He did ask for internet relays and gave his email address, and I did oblige. Too bad he didn't give me the courtesy of a "welcome to California".

This net also apparently has a QRMer who is disrupting the net. He did it Friday and Sunday nights (he's doing it now as I type this but he never does it when I hit the recorder) and it sounds like he's a regular occurrence.

He sounds like Jack Gerritsen, who was in Los Angeles, CA and was a problem during maritime emergency nets, but didn't have any real actions taken against him until the Coast Guard got involved. However, last I heard he was serving 7 years.

It would be nice to have at least one QSO before I leave San Diego, but the odds are not in my favor, as I can't seem to hit any repeaters. I'll keep trying, and see what happens.

Back from camping

What a weekend. Camping in North Carolina is certainly an experience.

To quote a famous book, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."

For the first of June, it was way hotter than expected, and hotter than normal for this time of year. Usually the heat waits until Field Day weekend.

Just getting out of the driveway was a problem. The damned minivan wouldn't start! We jumped off with my Trailblazer, and then head off. To sum up that experience, the battery ran down if we kept the doors open longer than 5 minutes. I got that taken care of when we got back home (after a jump from the campground manager). Still under warranty, free replacement battery...thank you Advance!

There was a family from South Carolina next to us, but they were away from the campsite when we arrived just after noon on Friday.

The first thing I noticed when we arrived was this eerie sound of the Cicadas coming around for their 17-year cycle of life. The sound was a constant high-pitched whine, almost like a transceiver on a dead frequency or just above a frequency where someone is tuning their radio. To have that sound all around you was somewhat haunting.

We surprised the girls when we showed them their cabin. Designed for the kids to have something to do and even use as a shelter as we'd find out later.
Kids' Cabin
We spend the day setting up and settling in. Of course I run to Wal-Mart to get supplies. One surprise for me was that we had AC at the kids' cabin! First thing to get is fans, then extension cords.

The kids enjoy the creek next to the cabin, barely knee-deep for the girls at it's lowest point so I don't have to worry too much.

We meet our tent neighbors and they have a 3-yr-old, and she and my girls hit it off from minute 1. It was a good thing too, because our next set of campers weren't so good.

They show up around 6, and set up across the creek from where we were, things are good at first, but as the night wore on, they wore out their welcome real fast. I learned that they apparently have "family issues" with one guy who may or may not have smacked another's sister. Fortunately all this went on after our girls finally crashed. My tent neighbor (Sean) and I were hesitant to call the campsite manager, thinking he'd just give a warning, and there were only two campsites that would have complained, and pissing off the neighbors and waking up with slashed tires, slashed tent, or slashed me was not what I wanted.

Then things got weird.

One of them apparently was tripping out in a big way. They would walk by our campsites on the way to their cars, and were all the time arming and disarming the system, so we'd just hear "*beep beep*" every so often.

Then one of them would "whoop" every once in a while only to get told to STFU by his friends. Twas quite entertaining, to a point.

While this was going on, my wife and I dealt with a deflating air mattress that we decided was best deflated all the way and throwing a sleeping bag on top of them and crashing for the rest of the night.

I know my wife got little sleep, same as I. Riding on 3 hours sleep the night before, and suffering through heat and stressed out from the battery on the minivan, I finally passed out and I slept through Sean's apparent confrontation with one of them after hearing "*beep beep*" for the upteenth time.

The campsite manager was called out later on and did kick them out, around 6 in the morning.
He told us there were "no warnings" and that he'd have "backup" if they were out of control. Lesson learned for next time. Sean told us later he heard one of them remarking about how much Kool-Aid one of them drank, so it was apparent to him they were high on 'shrooms during the night. I thought it was the DTs from moonshine or something similar myself. Shows how much I know about drugs...

My wife, the kids, and I made our way to Catawba Falls the next day. It was a nice trek. I learned Lauren loves talking on the radio. It was an FRS radio but still I think I have a future ham in the making.

Catawba Falls
2 hours after we came back the most intense thunderstorm I've encountered in years built up right over our campground. I was using the Wi-Fi to update TWIAR's podcast, and at first I thought it was jet aircraft. Only when it got closer, and louder, did I take notice.

The wife and kids took shelter in the cabin, and I grabbed our dog and huddled in the tent to test out the water resistant spray we put on. Lightning struck real close several times, and I wondered if I should abandon the tent and go to the car. But just as quickly as it came, it ended. The tent survived with only minor leaking, and the dog, well, she's pretty scared of thunderstorms and she was a handful during the storm. I'm just glad she didn't leave us a present during the storm. The area must have been really dry, as the creek next to our campsite never rose after the storm, and after all that rain, I thought for sure there would be flooding.

The great thing was that the storm brought the oppressive heat down and shut the cicada's up until the next morning.

With all that excitement, I was wiped out and went to bed early and solidly slept despite being on little cushion. I was worried my back wouldn't like the hard, flat surface, but didn't have any issues.

The van died again as we packed up to leave, and that canceled our plans to go up to Mt. Mitchell to catch a view of the world from the highest peak east of the Mississippi. It was actually a godsend, as I was still exhausted from very little sleep and having to get up early in order to pack up. Traveling to Mt. Mitchell would have delayed our getting home and my getting some much-needed sleep.

Funny thing, as I type this, a hitchhiking bug just crawled across my shirt. He looks like an ant with huge antennae. I don't think I've seen them around here, so I assume he tagged along from the campground.

Overall, the trip was fun. Shroomed neighbors and oppressive heat aside, We're making plans to go back with my brother along for the ride. If only I can find a way to run QRP...

Out for the weekend

I'm going to take my family camping this weekend. The first time we've gone in 5 years.

I'm not big on the great outdoors, but I'm willing to suffer just to see how this turns out.

I plan to take the spare time and catch up on past editions of TWIAR/International and (hopefully) have some content for this blog forthcoming.

This campground sold me on the fact they have Wi-Fi!!! Now that's roughing it!!!

My sister-in-law (ex-ham, got her license at 13, let it expire) will be holding the fort until our return, and she just returned from Iowa (away from those tornadoes, thank heavens) and minding the cat.

Until then, have a good weekend.