K1BTC

Long path to Victoria an hour before local sunset, which I did not expect in February. Ninety watts into the end-fed, no tuner. He was steady for eleven minutes and then the path closed like a door.

Rewound the 49:1 transformer on the end-fed. Two-core stack, fourteen turns, 100 pF across the primary. SWR is 1.4 at 7.150 and under 2 across the band. The old one had been drifting since the ice storm and I had been pretending it hadn’t.

Left the rig decoding overnight. South Africa at −21, one clean exchange, no repeats. Also EA8, LU, and a handful of W6 stations that had no business being that loud at that hour.

Blue Hills. Seventeen-foot whip clamped to a picnic table, counterpoise thrown into the leaves. Cold enough that the paddle got unreliable after the second hour. Best DX a station in Wales on 20 m, which at ten watts I am still slightly suspicious of.

Ten metres open most of the afternoon. Everything answered on the first call, all of it on the vertical. Days like this are the whole argument for leaving a 10 m antenna up through a bad year.

First ragchew at 20 WPM with no decoder open in another window. Twenty-two minutes about antennas with a station in Maine. Missed maybe one word in fifteen and guessed the rest from context, which I am told is how it works.

Second ground rod, bonded to the first with 6 AWG and a proper clamp rather than the thing that was there before. Noise floor on 40 m went from S5 to S3. Should have done it four years ago.

Four hours, zero decodes, one probable ping at −24 that I would not put in a log if anyone were checking. Worth doing again in December.

Nothing rare about it, but it was the first contact on the rebuilt dipole and the first time the SWR meter sat still while I talked.

First contact on the Extra privileges. A station in Nova Scotia who had no idea he was anyone’s first anything. He told me my audio was flat, which was a useful first thing to hear.