Posts from — February 2008

For the last week, I’ve been in Ireland with Kate and having a blast. While not able to do any ham radio or participate in the ARRL contest, it’s still a great trip.

For the past week, we’ve spent four days in Dublin, touring the Guinness brewery plus taking two day trips to the far south and north of Dublin using their commuter train system. Pretty spectacular stuff.

Then, Thursday, Friday and today, we’ve spent at a bed and breakfast in Navan, about 40 KM northwest of Dublin. Our purpose here was to visit some of the ancient spiritual sites and to see the countryside.

Then, on Sunday, we return to Dublin and pick up a country-wide tour that covers Waterford, the Ring of Kerry, and Sligo before returning to Dublin next Saturday so that we can fly home on Sunday.

Our first week was to get acclimated, see a lot of Dublin as the tour doesn’t cover much of it, and get to the interior of Ireland a bit as the tour doesn’t cover that either.

The people have been great, the jet lag was tough, and Guinness is my new favorite beer. And Kate and I have spent some great time together. All in all, a really great trip.

Some pics:

This is a view of downtown Drogheda, a town on the Irish Sea north of Dublin. We got here using the DART, the commuter train after about an hour’s travel with stops.

Having a complimentary pint of Guinness in the “Gravity Bar.” The bar has a 330 degree view of Dublin City from about seven stories up. Below is a picture of part of the city from the Gravity Bar:

Taken through a window, of course, so you can see shadows of people there. But, a clear day in Dublin in February — very rare.

Finally, a picture of the harbor at Dun Laoghaire, a seaside city south of Dublin. We traveled here as well using the DART.

It’s been great fun.

Scot, K9JY

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Ward Silver, N0AX, in the Contester’s Rate Sheet, offered up a pretty good point on what we are doing in the hobby:

What I’ve found is that the longer a ham has been licensed, the FEWER different aspects of ham radio they are likely to use. We are creatures of habit and once formed, we tend to pertinaciously follow those habits, frequently becoming incredibly deep experts to be sure, growing narrower, relatively speaking. It is rare individual that can lay claim to being a Renaissance Ham.

As we develop and hone our expertise, we may also find that we have explored much of what there is to explore in our chosen niches. Our hamming begins to become permeated with a sameness that leads to a quietus of “been there, done that”. Does this stoic inertia sound familiar?

Indeed, it does. One of the great aspects of this hobby is the tremendous diversity of subjects that can be learned, practiced, and shared within the hobby itself.

I’ve always made it a consistent action on my part that when I move, I try to do one new thing in the hobby that I haven’t done before. This has resulted in rag chewing, DXing, contesting from home, packet radio and DX spotting, multi-contesting, and DXpeditioning.

But this move to this house has resulting in not doing something new in the hobby. And part of what that has meant is that I don’t have a station up and working right now — any antenna would have half its signal hit the earth, so why is it worth it?

Well, it is. I chose to live in this house for very good reasons, completely understanding the challenge of ham radio from this location (both the house and the Pacific Northwest).

So in a couple of weeks after Kate and I return from EI-land, I’m going to figure out how to get a station up on the air. I haven’t done much with PSK or the other exotic digital modes and, given my half-earth ground plane, I think a concentrated signal would help a lot.

I’m not going to with the ARRL CW contest from home — that much is for sure.

But there is more to the hobby than each of our cherished portions of ham radio.

Time to do a bit of exploring.

Scot, K9JY

A shack and clutter go together, don’t they? Well, I don’t know about you, but every time I go to the back of the table to work on something, the wires there have seemed to multiply — and interweave themselves — all the time.

Jeff, KE9V, suggested this site in an e-mail: http://decluttered.com. And it’s a good site with some pretty interesting ideas on controlling the wires that have now come upon all of us that wee need to work and play.

Here’s a snapshot:

Take a look; there are some pretty good ideas presented there.

Scot, K9JY