New England QRP Club : The Excitement is Building....

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I made a QRP entry for ARRL SS CW. It was my first significant effort since 2001 and a near match for that year's result. I claimed 198 QSOs and scored around 26k. Spent most of my time on 40, followed by 20 and 15.

As mentioned here, I got curious about the check pattern and did a little calculating. The only way I can read this result is that CW contest aficionados are aging. I don't suppose this comes as a surprise.

Number of Years Since First Licensed (mean±SD)
40.4 ± 12.6 years

I received just one check from the 21st century. That's about one-half of one percent. Kinda gloomy.

From today's neqrp mailing list...

Some Nescaf comments picked from the DC-40 list server...
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It seems like the receiver bandwidth is pretty wide.... I was hearing 10 QSO's going on at the same time. Maybe this will motivate me to build the NESCAF filter. I guess since there is no Xtal filter, it should be fairly wide. Dennis
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Dennis,
There is a 600 Hz audio filter built-in. Unless the signals are really strong you shouldn't hear much outside of that bandwidth. Otherwise, the front end is quite wide with only a simple tuned circuit. If you have a way to generate a low level tunable signal see if you can verify that the 600 Hz filter is working. You should hear a definite peak. The NEScaf is a good idea too. Chuck

Two contests run through QRP Afield and a third overlaps its second half. I'd like to take advantage of the concurrent contests to build my QSO total, but their exchanges are all different.

• QRP Afield: RS(T) + S/P/C + Power/NEQRP Number
• South Carolina QSO Party: Serial Number + S/P/C/SC County
• Scandinavian Activity Contest: RS(T) + Serial Number
• Washington State Salmon Run: RS(T) + S/P/C/WA County

EDIT (13 SEP 2007)

In November I spent $10 on a receiver kit and yesterday finally finished putting it together enough to hear signals on 80 meter CW. It was my introduction to software-defined radio; the kit was a SoftRock Lite, kitted by Tony, KB9YIG.

I had been on the fence about SDR for quite a while, and the bargain-priced SoftRock series tempted me more than once in '06. But the psychological threshold broke when the single-band SR Lite was introduced. Even if I destroyed the parts during assembly, I wouldn't be heartbroken over the loss of $10.

1k1c arrived in 03901 on 9/1. Manual's printed. Wish me luck.