During the middle of the night on Saturday/Sunday, I got a low battery voltage warning on the KX3. That struck me as odd, as I had recently charged up my 12V 10 Ah battery. I was expecting it to last the entirety of Field Day.  But in the heat of battle you really don't think twice about it, so I took it off line and hastily replaced with a recently purchased 12v 5 Ah battery that I had gotten about two weeks ago. THAT battery lasted the second half of Field Day without a whimper.

When I got home from work on Monday, I put the 10 Ah battery on my charger and was getting a battery failure indication. It was reading at a level of 10V and 0% capacity and would not accept a charge, I was wondering how can this be? It was purchased new and I haven't put it through nearly enough cycles to have exhausted it. I figured it must be a battery charger fault, so I hooked up the 5 Ah battery to the charger to see what it said. The 5 Ah (which was in use for roughly the same amount of time, if not more) was down to only 11.8 Volts and had 89% capacity left in it! And the charger's fan started running as soon as I hooked it up.

No charger fault - I got a bad 12V 10 Ah battery. Dang!

I don't remember where I purchased it, whether it was from eBay or Amazon, but it doesn't matter. Its not like you can return a battery some 11 months after you've bought it online. I had purchased it after the 2023 Skeeter Hunt when my last deep cycle battery gave up the ghost. I don't want to be scrambling for electrons during the Hunt this year, so I went on eBay and found an economically (cheaply) priced 12V 10 Ah Deep Cycle Gel Cell battery.

I know, you guys are probably thinking, why didn't he go lithium?  Price mainly, but also because I don't feel like purchasing a dedicated lithium battery charger. I once ruined a small lithium battery by not using the correct charger on it and I don't want to relive that escapade. I learned that lesson well. However, should this battery not last longer than a cycle or two, I guess I'll bite the bullet. Maybe spending a little more right now would be the right thing to do in the long run, but I guess I'm too frugal to have reached that point yet.

It should be at my house in about a week - long before it's needed for the Skeeter Hunt on August 18th - which, by the way, we've had 93 sign ups so far and the 1st Day of Summer was only 6 days ago!

And looky see what came in the mail yesterday!

Not an ATNO, but an ATNC - All Time New Confirmation. I've worked Easter Island before, but never got a QSL card.

72 de Larry W2LJ

QRP - When you care to send the very least!

Here are a couple more QSL cards from my collection of QSLs whose calls spell words….

I’ve actually had this care for a while, but I just ran across it while going through a pile of cards I received from the bureau.

Here’s one that’s appropriate for the season.

I didn’t know that Rochester had such an impressive waterfall. I’m going to have to visit there sometime to see it.

I’ve written before about the cache of old QSLs that my brother came across several months ago while conducting an estate sale. The recipient of these QSLs lived near Detroit, so it’s understandable that many of the cards he received came from hams in the “Motor City.”

W8IFI proudly proclaims himself to be “The Voice of the Motor City.” W8BNG more modestly announces that he is “in the Motor City.” W8KWX’s card simply says, “The Motor City.”

I looked up these addresses on Google Maps, and the only house still standing is the house at 1294 W. Grand Blvd. It looks like 5317 Maybury Grand was razed to make way for the I-96 Freeway.  6128 Comstock is simply gone. The date that  Google Maps last shows a house there is August 2013. Now that whole block is almost completely deserted.

I recently posted about the collection of QSL cards from the 1930s and 1940s that my brother discovered at an estate sale that he conducted. I was very pleased to see that many of them had call signs that spelled words. I plan to add all of these to my collection

My brother, Mike, runs an estate sale company, Metro Detroit Estate Sales (shameless plug intended). From time to time, he’ll call me when a sale he’s conducting includes some electronics or ham radio gear.

A couple of months ago, he called and said that this most recent sale included a bunch of miscellaneous amateur radio-related stuff. The owner of the house, who passed away, was the daughter of W8HZN, and the estate included some of his logbooks, some old QSL cards from the 1930s, and some Popular Electronics magazines from the 1960s.

This evening, I finally got around to looking at the QSL cards. One of the things that struck me was that so many of them were hand-made. Apparently, they would purchase post cards from the post office (only a penny each, including postage!) and created their own designs.

This first one was one of the more elaborate. Hamtramck is a city completely surrounded by the city of Detroit.

Many hams had stamps made with their call signs. They would stamp their call on a postcard and add the rest of the information by hand.

This card is notable because it has three different colors.

One thing that you’ll notice is that all of these card are brown with age. You can imagine what they would have looked like 90 years ago.

There were more than 100 QSL card in the box that my brother found, so this is just the tip of the iceberg. I’ll be writing more about this treasure trove of ham radio history in the future.

A couple days ago, I worked Scott, W1AL. When I looked him up on QRZ.Com, I found this:

That looked remarkably like my “retro QSL:”

so I emailed him and asked him if I’d sent it to him. He replied, “I thought your call sounded familiar!”

Propagation at sunset

If you’re like me, you’ve noticed how radically propagation can change around sunset. One transmission, a station is just booming in. On the next transmission, however, they’re down in the mud. I would love for someone to explain to me the mechanics of that.

Showing a new op the ropes

Earlier this evening, a station answered my CQ by simply sending his call a single time. Normally, I don’t reply to those stations, but I decided to this time for some reason. I’m glad I did.

This fellow was not a ragchewer at all. He didn’t know the standard protocol for a CW contact, and he admitted as much. He said that he’d operated in CW contests, but hadn’t really done any ragchewing.

So, I took the opportunity to teach him how to do it. For example, he’d just stop sending when he was finished with what he had to say. He didn’t send BK or even K. I explained why that was important, and by the end of the contact, he was doing this correctly.

I’m glad I took the time to explain things to him, instead of just blowing him off. After all, how else is he going to learn how to do it? He seemed like an interesting fellow, and I hope that I hear him on again sometime. I’m going to send him a copy of my CW Geek’s Guide to Having Fun with Morse Code, and hope that that encourages him to do more ragchewing.