The Minnesota Wireless Association (MWA) has been asked to sponsor the NU1AW/Ø callsign for the 2008 IARU contest this summer. The club has accepted this request and Bill, ACØW is creating a station lineup. I volunteered to operate the 15m SSB position. A variety of MWA members will simultaneously cover all the bands and mode during this contest. This is a 24-hour event starting at 6:00 AM local time on Saturday, July 12, 2008. The propogation on the 15 and 10 meter bands has been dismal at best. I have a Digital Voice Keyer (DVK) setup and it will help save my voice when the contact rate drops to low levels. (It will automatically call CQ for hours on end if necessary!)

 

I haven't been doing much radio contesting, although I put a few hours into some of the recent events. Two things have come up to distract me. First is the request to make two presentations for the WØDXCC Convention in Rochester, MN in August. One topic is an offshoot of the Excel spreadsheets I have been creating for contest planning and log analysis. The second presentation will be about contesting using the RTTY mode. The RTTY contesting topic will be relatively easy but I'm not certain how I will approach the contest planning & log analysis topic. I've got about two months to figure that out.

 

The second distraction has been a few break-throughs in the Chudek/Czudek family research. I made a few new contacts and found a couple of new family links in the trees I constructed during the past 12 years. I have been following up on these leads for the past two months.

 

Our area has had a late spring so outdoor planting and yard work are finally kicking in. One disappointment was the loss of 6 spruce trees over the winter. These will need to be replaced. There's a nursery auction in a couple of weeks and Mary and I have been successful in getting trees for the yard during these sales. It's a lot of physical work and the "payoff" won't be realized for a decade or two.

 

I made a query on the MWA contesting reflector to see if there was any interest in doing a portable Field Day operation from North Dakota in June. I haven't gotten any strong leads yet. I'll have to shake the bushes a little harder or scrub the idea for this year.

I had not received a QSL Bureau shipment in a very long time. Typically many cards roll in because of all the contests I particpate in. I shot an email to the bureau manager and discovered there were nearly three pounds of cards waiting for me. I sent a $15 check for postage. A couple months later I received a shipment with 348 QSL cards enclosed.

 

I scanned 22 new Czech Republic cards and put them to the Czech QSL album. The quality of QSL cards has increased dramatically with many fully color photo cards and double sided printing. The tools for managing the images on this website has changed since the last time I uploaded files. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to rearrange the images so they continue to appear in alphabetical order.

 

 

I traveled to Grand Forks, North Dakota the first weekend in November to operate the ARRL CW Sweepstakes contest. This was the first time I operated from a location highly desired by other contesters. In this years contest, I would be the sought after station. North Dakota is typically an elusive contact during contests because there are few active operators in the state. A short article and some photos have been published online here:  http://www.tcdxa.org/newsletter.html 

 

Prior to leaving for Grand Forks I made a final check of my radio equipment. It was a good thing I did because the main transceiver was not working properly. It normally provides 100 watts of RF output power, but when checking it the night before I was leaving, I found there was no output power! Luckily my host, Glenn Johnson - WØGJ had several transceivers available to use.

 

The Minnesota Wireless Association held its annual fall meeting at Broadway Pizza in Fridley, MN in September. I made a PowerPoint presentation on RTTY Contesting, what it takes for hardware, software, setup, and some basic operating caveats. At the meeting the MWA certificates for the 2006/2007 contest season were awarded. I received a Gold Level certificate for my 1+ million points contributed to the club score last season. I also received my XU7MWA QSL card from Tony - KMØO. That was a 20 meter QSO in the final 15 minutes of the 2006 CQWW CW contest last fall. Nice card. This month I received a First Place ARRL Division award for the 2006 10-meter contest. I added all three of these items to the photo albums on this website.

 

I reconnected the 440 foot Beverage antenna for the season after replacing the weathered rope at the NE end. It checked out perfect with the AEA HF Analizer when I tested it. Earlier this fall I strung 5 coaxial cables up the tower and now have feedlines for all my antennas. I also took down the gin pole that had been left up there the past year and a half.

 

I raised both ends of the 160m inverted vee by using a different tree to the NW and installing a Universal tower top section and aluminum mast to the SE. Checking the VSWR and other plots it is ready to go.

 

I need to install a connect on the coax cable for the 144/440 MHz vertical and connect my VHF/UHV transceiver. Some of the contesters have been bugging me to get on 2 meters during the contests.

 

I've been invited to run the ARRL CW Sweepstakes from Glenn Johnson's Grand Forks QTH. He installed a BigIR vertical and radial system last weekend. This contest is 24 out of 30 hours and starts Saturday afternoon (1800 Zulu).

 

I completed the upload of the KØD Special Event logs to eQSL and LoTW. I ran this call during the 2007 CQWW DX RTTY contest. I created a electronic eQSL and have also printed a few cards on my local printer. I've had one mail in request from a Czech immigrant who arrived in the USA in the 1960's. Other than that, all QSL requests are apparently being satisfied by the online systems.

 

Here's the KØD Special Event QSL card I designed today and posted on www.qrz.com

 

If you contact KØD, your confirmation will be uploaded to both eQSL and LoTW databases. You can then print an electronic QSL card from the www.eQSL.cc website.

 

 

 

 

I applied for the Special Event callsign KØD to use from the 20th through the 30th of September, 2007. This special event commerates the 100th anniversary of the immigration of my grandfather, Johann Czudek. He was born in the small village of Milikov [now in the Czech Republic] in 1884 and immigrated to the United States in the spring of 1907. He was a wireless radio pioneer, learning about the new wireless technology through a correspondence course, radio magazines, and building TRF receiver kits. He donated his prized Philco console shortwave receiver to me which was the catalyst for my entry into SWLing, amateur radio, and the electronics industry.

 

 The mailbox provided two new certificates this past weekend (pre-Labor Day 2007). One was a First Place finish in the W0 District during the 2006 CQWW RTTY Contest. The second was from John S. Melo - VE6JDD who was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the immigration by his father into Canada. John was operating in cooperation with the Consulate of Portugal in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada with the Special Event callsign VC6CTCU. I received certificate number 8 for our 2-way contact on 5 June 2007 at 17:52 UTC using SSB on 14.200 MHz.

 

You will find the new Special Event certificate in the Miscellaneous Album and the CQWW RTTY certificate in the Contesting Album.

 

 

This past weekend Mary and I participated in the local city-wide Garage Sale. I have been hauling worthless keepsakes to the end of the driveway the past couple of years. Using this method I have managed to dispose of a couple tons of obsolete hardware and software at no cost! The garage sale was an attempt to recover some money from the more valuable keepsakes. It was a lot of work and we are both wore out from the physical labor. But we put about $300 into the kitty.

 

During this latest purge, I found three more FCC licenses which had been tucked away in a storage box. These were my original FCC Commercial Radiotelephone First Class obtained in 1975 and a susequent renewal in 1981. The FCC changed to lifetime licensing and issued General Radio Telephone certificates when I renewed in 1985.

 

Along with these two commercial tickets I also found my original Citizens Band license!. Do you remember the govenment attempt to license every person who bought a CB radio? I was issued the callsign KXI-3965 in the fall of 1975. Overall the licensing scheme was a flop and the CB airwaves turned into a chaotic free-for-all. My car had dual CB antennas and several Ham Radio HF and VHF aerials as well. Traveling down the Pennsylvania turnpike, a trucker provided a new handle for me. I was to be known as "Pin cushion" from that time forward!

 

I have added these 3 certificates to the License Album which brings the total up to 9 images.

 

After posting a variety of QSL cards for posterity, I thought it would be a good idea to upload other documents I have acquired during my amateur radio career too. These documents have spent their life in a file cabinet. You will find new albums for images of memberships to organizations I belong, various FCC radio licenses I have achieved, and some of my contest certificates.  I will create a Miscellaneous album for the oddball certificates that don't fit into these categories too.

This weekend I have been scanning cards from my QSL collection and posted these images in one of three photo albums. Some of these cards date to the early 1960's. There are a few cards from countries that no longer exist! For example; East Germany, Yugoslavia, Togoland, Zanzibar, and Czechoslovakia.

 

Amateur radio operators exchange QSL cards to "confirm" that a 2-way communication actually took place. These QSL cards can then be submitted to organizations that sponsor different awards. The award goals differ, depending upon the sponsor. Some of the most popular awards are WAC (Worked All Continents), WAS (Worked All States), WAZ (Worked All Zones - there are 40), and DXCC (DX Century Club). The basic DXCC award is obtained by submitting confirmation of 2-way communication with 100 or more countries.

 

I have added two Photo Albums to the site so far. Select one or the other using the drop down menu in the upper left corner of the Photo Album window.