Presidents Letter:
I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays and is recovered from all the festivities. We tend to overdo it so if you are like my family, you were probably looking forward to going back to work or school.
It being a new year I want to remind you to send in your membership dues. It completely slipped my mind and I just recently sent them in. I also wanted to mention that elections are coming up next month and you need to be a paid member to vote or to run for office.
Since I am also the Field Day chairman I wanted to mention that we will be holding our planning meetings starting next month. Check on the reflector for the upcoming meeting dates. We already have our location reserved thanks to Butch / W4HJL.
On the radio side, I have FT8 on my radio and computer working well. I stayed up late one night and tried to make as many contacts as I could. A little background, I am using an ICOM 7100 which has 100 Watts output on HF, into a vertical antenna which is attached to 10 ft of 2 inch conduit on my deck. I found that I could reliably make contacts into Canada to the north and the Dominican Republic in the south. No contacts on the other side of the pond as they say. I varied between trying to contact those calling CQ and calling CQ myself. I did have some one in Spain try to call me but was unable to complete the exchange, which surprised me since I spent a lot of my time trying to contact Europe with no success. I thought I might try another antenna if I can get my OCF Buckmaster back up. With the contacts I made I thought I better get them uploaded to Logbook of the World. The last time I used it, it was on another computer so after getting another certificate I thought, no problem I should be able to do this now. However, I found out that I had password protected it and since the other computer was remembering the password for me (which is now dead), I had no clue what it was. Oh I tried a few of my favorite passwords to use but no luck. Now running out of time I had to abandon my efforts for now. I want to publicly thank John / KG4NXT, Don / WA2SWX and Tony / KM4KLB for helping me with the FT8 and also with trying to get LotW working again. I did find out what to do to get it working. If you haven’t tried FT8, I recommend it to all. It’s strangely satisfying to work on getting something to work and the joy when it finally does.
I know I have mentioned this before, but as a reminder, starting on Saturday, January 12th we will be meeting at the Yorkshire Restaurant on the Saturday before our club meetings at 8:00 am for breakfast. It will be an opportunity to socialize and eat a great breakfast. I never get to talk to everyone I would like to at our meetings because of the time constraint and thought that this would be one way to get to talk to more club members. If you have time to join us on January 12th, please come and feel free to invite family and or friends.
The next regular OVH meeting will be on Tuesday evening, January 15th at 7:30 pm at the Buckhall Fire Station, Manassas. I hope to see all of you there.
73 BYRON AK4XR