Ham Radio Stuff

I went to the Livonia swap last weekend. It was an OK swap I guess.. There was an ice storm and the roads were pretty bad. Alot of people showed up anyway. It was a very crowded swap with narrow isles. I ended finding and buying a Clegg 22'er. This is a 2 meter AM tube transciever. The radio is in almost mint condition. It didn't come with any transmit crystals or manual or mic. I bought a 144.45 transmit crystal online as well as an OEM Clegg mic and scanned manual. The whole setup costs less than 100 dollars. It will be interesting to see how it preforms on the air. The radio is capable of about 20 watts, although I have seen reports of the radio doing close to 45 so we will see. I think I am going to take the radio to work tomorrow and blow all the dust out of it so it is ready to go when the mic, crystal, and manual come.

Also, on a side note, a Shure model #450 Dispatch Mic sounds like crap on a Yaesu FT-1802. :)

2007 CQ WW DX SSB Contest

Well, I worked my very first CQ WW DX SSB Contest over the past weekend. I set
a goal for 500 contacts for myself. The goal was set before I realized that
the stations were going to be all from other countries, nothing stateside. The
stateside contacts didn't count for any points, just other countries and other
zones. I had a good time overall with 20:18:33 total operating time. That
includes tuning around and trying to work stations. I was originaly going to
pick a frequency on each band and call CQ Contest but that didn't work out to
well because there were not many stateside contacts as I mentioned. The
Contest was for 160M, 80M, 40M, 20M, 15M, and 10M. I have no 160 or 80 antenna
here so I was limited to only 4 bands. Station was a 746Pro Icom running 100
Watts. Antenna was a G5RV-JR, 52 foot long 40-10 Dipole up at 15 feet high.
Stats are as followed:

40 Meter = 48 Contacts, 22 Countries, and 14 Zones.
20 Meter = 65 Contacts, 31 Countries, and 15 Zones.
15 Meter = 27 Contacts, 19 Countries, and 9 Zones.
10 Meter = 13 Contacts, 10 Countries, and 7 Zones.

153 Total Contacts, 310 QSO Points, 127 Multipliers for a total score of 39370.

Not too bad for my modest setup. It was awesome to see 10 meters open into
south america and the caribbean. I was hoping to work Barbados on 10 but no
joy. I did however work Barbados on 40 and 20. 8P5A on 40 and 20 and 8P6SH on
40. I had a good time. Not as many contacts as field day but quality DX
contacts.

I won money! (for real this time)

I am slow to upate this, sorry. About 3 weeks ago I was at work when I got a call from Ray. He said that one of our clients sons ran into our office and said that I won money on 94.7 WCSX www.wcsx.com I was skeptical at first. Anyway, I called and was added to the workforce. You get added to the workforce and every hour they call a name, you make 100 dollars right off the bat and if the next person they call doesn't call back then you keep winning 100 dollars an hour. I wound up winning 400 dollars! I was pretty pumped! Me and Piper and Andrew went down to the studio to pick up the cash a few days later.. It was awesome! We got to go back into the studio and they recorded a promo with Andrew saying "My dad won 400 dollars on 94.7 WCSX". It really helped out with the bills. :)

Ghost in the machine = DEMON

Well, the Acer Notebook crapped out... It is En Route to Texas for warranty repair as I write this. I am glad that it crapped out while it was still under warranty though. I have this IBM thinkpad that I am using now but I do have the choice of 5 computers in the house to use. Hey, Glen, what was that about Acer being owned by NEC now and the quality. :) Oh well.

WOW!! A HERO!!

This is amazing. This is a 60 year old guy who lives on lake Erie in Ohio. He sees a Plane crash into the lake and his first thought? Grab a rowboat and start going towards it to help. What an amazing guy! Most people would just call 911 and say to themselves "Man everybody is dead" or "Let the professionals handle it" This guy saved the life of a 7 year old kid because of his actions. It is refreshing to see something positive in the news for once. It is too bad the kid lost his brother and dad in the crash. I almost started crying when I saw this story. If I was in that situation, I would do the same thing. I am the kind of person that doesn't think of the consequences in an emergency situation, I just act. Amazing! This guy should get something for his effort. Watch the video for yourself and tell me that this guy is not awesome. WOW! I just can't believe this. http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/09/04/oh.plane.into.lake.erie.wews

BBS back up and running

The BBS (Bulletin Board System) is back up and running after being down for about a month and a half. It was moved from an EMachines crap computer (The motherboard fried) to an IBM eServer. The eServer is pretty cool and I have 3 - 40GB Hard drives in it and 512 MB ram, the processor is a Celeron 2GHZ (Which is more than enough to host my BBS. If you want to check it out and remember the good old days, download and install this program http://www.theroughnecks.net/download/mTelnet-1.0b12-Setup.exe After you install that (make sure you don't uncheck any of the boxes during setup) go here to log on and enjoy the BBS telnet://scannerbbs.dyndns.org

Ghost In The Machine

I have been having some computer problems here. For one, my AMD Turion 64 notebook's USB ports stopped working. This happened about 4 days ago. I devoted much of yesterday to try and fix it. I searched and searched online for about 2 hours looking for people with similar problems. They were all XP related.. Nothing reported in Vista since that is what operating system my notebook runs on (Blech!). I fiddled with it for a good 4 hours total before just finally giving up. This really sucks too because I hate the touchpad mouse and had a wireless laser mouse hooked up. This also meant I had to Install Itunes on a different computer and all that too. I had a dream last night that I plugged in my mouse and it worked so I work up this morning, plugged it in and HA HA! It works. All the ports work now and so does my Ipod. Weird, I guess I had a premonition about it. I also had a dream that I was doin' 2 chicks in a big hot tub. :-) Anyway, maybe something I did yesterday fixed it, or maybe it was my dream. At any rate, Windows Vista is know for weird intermittent problems. I have seen more weird stuff going on with Vista than anything else. I am just glad that it works now, and hopefully doesn't happen again.

Klaus revisited

Awhile ago, Glen sent me a video about a German man named Klaus. It was the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life. I have long since then lost the video and haven't seen it around for a long time. Ray found it on YouTube recently. Here it is, enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r5gZnx4y0c

My Space is stupid and it sucks and is dumb and not cool.

I like writing and reading blogs. However, It sucks when everyone I know (Glen excluded, I don't think he has a My Space page) has a My Space page and you can't look at their pics or read their blogs because you don't have a My Space page. I caved and created one just for the fact that I would like to do those fore mentioned things. Don't expect anything flashy from it though. I spent 3 min on it and it is going to stay that way. If you are still curious, here it is: http://myspace.com/w8zzu

I look like people?

I was at work yesterday setting up a hospital bed. The daughter of the person I was setting up the bed for said "You look like Tony Stewart". I said "Who is Tony Stewart". She said "He is a nascar driver, he drives the number 20 Home Depot car". That is why I didn't know who he was, I don't follow nascar. So, I said "Is he good looking or ugly?" and she said "He is real good looking". At that point, I was wondering if she was hitting on me or what. Sometimes I am a little slow with things like that.. Anyway, I decided to look up this Tony Stewart. Below is a Pic of me and a pic of Tony Stewart. Hint - I am shooting the shotgun.

You be the judge. I was told awhile ago that I also look like Justin Leonard. He is a golfer. Here is a Pic of him:

I think I look more like Justin Leonard than Tony Stewart. Maybe it is just the sunglasses? Oh well, if you go back far enough, we are all related anyway. :-)