Category — VP9/K9JY

Bermuda flag on top, with Canada and United States flags below. From the VP9/K9JY contest DXpedition.

Scot, K9JY

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This week I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of behind-the-scenes work on the blog. Essentially, the new theme here uses “CSS” for rendering pictures, but most of my pictures that accompany articles use “HTML” for how the picture is presented. If you used Internet Explorer, you didn’t notice. If you use Firefox or Safari, the picture moved right up to the text — not what I want to show.

Consequently, I spent most of yesterday going into each article I have written since the beginning of the blog — 131 of them — and updating the picture framing.

Interestingly, I also found a lot of missing in action items which I didn’t realize were gone from my conversion from Yahoo! to Bluehost hosting and transferring the articles over. So much of the day was replacing pictures and fixing up the content.

Here is some of what got updated:

TI Antenna Setup — it was missing the pictures of the antennas…

Searching for Salt Water and the pictures for the County and State Parks were missing pictures.

Icom 7700 You Tube Video — the link properly displays now on the blog…and this is one of my more popular articles on the blog! One could see the video OK if you clicked on the link over to You Tube, but this fixes it so you can see the video on the blog itself…like it should be…

General fixing of the pictures was also done. Plus, I updated the series of rotating pictures at the header of the theme. Hopefully, they will represent ham radio and contesting well.

I’ve also added in a “Similar Posts” plugin that will automatically bring up other posts relating to the one being viewed.

Scot, K9JY

Finally, after way too long, I’ve gotten caught up on the direct cards and those from the WF5E DX-QSL service for VP9. All of the stamped envelopes are in the mail and the ones needing air mail stamps will be in the mail tomorrow. I’m stopping at the Post Office during my lunch hour to get the stamps and get them in the mail.

Thanks for the patience…

Now, on to the TI5 cards.

Scot

This weekend, I spent a decent amount of time on my logs, logging program, and Log of The World stuff. The end objective was to move all of my logging from my desktop computer to my relatively new laptop computer. And, at the same time, move from one logging program to another.

Success. There are a few impacts from this:

• TI QSL’s. Since the first part of March, I’ve had QSL’s from my trip to TI coming in and I haven’t answered any of them. I knew I wasn’t going to use my current logging program for tracking, but I didn’t want to send out cards just from the WriteLog log alone as I want to track my replies. (Log of The World for TI went up the weekend after I got home — the fastest way to get a confirmation).
• VP9 QSL’s. I still have cards to do for the September, 2005, VP9 trip. Just this past Thursday, I received another batch from the great W9 bureau guys to process. I’ve been sitting on VP9 cards for a bit because of this logging conundrum. The Bermuda logs were also uploaded within a week of getting home as well, so this is still the fastest and best way to get a confirmation.

One of the discoveries I made was that I had not submitted my Log of The World contacts for the NB9C and KA9QVD calls that I have held. I had thought that I had all of them into the database, but it turned out that I only had the K9JY calls uploaded. Most, if not the vast majority, of my DX work was done with the NB9C call, so I wanted to have that up in the database.

How did I discover this? Trying to find the ADI files to import into the new logging program!

So all of this is now settled: all of my logs are up in Log of The World, all of my log is transitioned to the new logging program, and I’m now set to get moving on the QSL cards, for which people have been patient.

Scot

Yesterday, I received a call from W4MPY, the QSL Man, on my TI5 QSL cards. They are ready and shipping, so I should have them next week.

I have a LOT of QSL’ing to do, both for TI and for VP9.

Time to get on it.

If you are interested in the photos from TI5, there are 171 of them posted up on Flickr. They include some of the antennas we used, a trip to the Pacific Ocean, and some of the views of one of the 25 or so volcano’s in the country. And I thought Mt. St. Helens had fame…

Scot, K9JY