N5YT

I had a blast working the NA Sprint sponsored by the National Contest Journal, www.ncjweb.com. This is a 4 hour contest that has a super simple exchange of a serial number, name ,and state. I have participated in Field Day but never have contested on my own before, so I thought this would be a good chance to get my feet wet. I didn’t have much time to prepare for the contest so I downloaded N1MM’s Contest Logger program and installed it on the PC in my shack. 20 meters was pretty much shot early on in the contest so I switched to 40 meters and made the majority of my contacts there. I worked a lot of stations on the west coast. I decided to try 80 meters but I only worked a handful of stations on that band due to lots of atmospheric noise…I guess it was Hurricane Ike. I made a total of 83 contacts with 26 multipliers. I don’t guess that was too bad considering my antenna is only about 15 feet off the ground at its highest point and running 100 watts. I plan on getting the antenna, which is a 360′ delta loop, up to its normal operating point sometime in the next week or two. I took the antenna down Friday to replace the feedline and had some trouble getting it back into the trees.

Hello blog-world. I would like to introduce myself since this is my first blog entry. My name is Guy and my callsign is N5YT. First of all I have been licensed since April of 1996, three months before my 15th birthday. So I have been hamming almost half my life. I was introduced to electronics by my dad. I was introduced to ham radio by Leon, W5NA, when he was passing by my parents house and seeing my dad’s CB antenna.
The majority of my operating is in the HF bands DXing or checking into the HiFivers Net on 3908. I also like to build antennas and some small station accessories.
I hope to make this a fun and exciting blog with plenty of audio clips and even some video thrown in. I plan on updating often and providing some updates on band conditions. This is supposedly the start of solar cycle 24 and I want to document that on my blog by updating band condtions and audio clips of some of the stations I hear and work. I also plan on documenting some of my antenna and station accessory projects. So please check back often and listen for me on the HF bands.

73’s for now de N5YT