After clearing customs, fetching my luggage, finding some coffee and scraping ice off my rental car, I headed over to Garðskagaviti to pick up a geocache near the lighthouse. The cold helped wake me up from the overnight flight until the coffee could kick in. Next, I drove down the Reykjanes peninsula to the point where you could walk between continental plates. This is the intersection of the North American and Europe’s continents. Another great opportunity to walk and marvel at geology ...

For ham folks who stumble here, the tl;dr is I’ll try to activate four parks on the air as TF/WT8P. I will be QRP, which means CW or FT8 are preferred modes. Logging should happen pretty quickly because Iceland is well-connected. I’ve been overthinking my trip to Iceland, but this is what I’ve settled on: Day 1: Arrive 6:15 am and rent a car. Overnight in Reykjavik. KEF to Blue Lagoon earthcaches, some puzzles, then Reyjkavik ...

I wrapped up another field day with my friend Paul (W7PEZ) in Eastern Washington. For the two days, I had 204 contacts, broken out roughly as: Yes, I worked SSB. It was kinda Frankfurt United Norway WT8P is sporting the 6-day salt and pepper look Paul worked 200 contacts, nearly all CW. Both are personal records. Neither of us were “running,” which would certainly have bumped up the totals, nor did we operate all the time, because most of the fun of Field Day is Everything Else. ...

In geocaching, there are a lot of “challenges” published, where in addition to signing the log, you have an alternative logging requirement (“ALR”) to perform some feat. These can be as simple as “find 10 mystery caches” or “find a cache for every letter in the alphabet,” or more complicated. In my 15 years, I’ve done a lot of these, and some of my favorites: John Day Fossil Beds, Sheep Rock Unit, Oregon ...

My first HF radio, the Elecraft KX3, was air-cooled and got me spoiled to the relatively quiet operation. The K4D, on the other hand, has two fans. Although the “base” ventilation speed has been lowered, there’s also some whining from the bearings. Most hams can’t hear it, I, unfortunately, can and don’t enjoy the sound. I’d previously replaced the ones in my VHF/UHF radios, and reasoned there would be a similar process, but I’d been holding off until (a) the warranty expired, (b) I could find a fan that would fit and (c) someone else did it first, because I don’t want to the guy who finds the way to mess this up! ...

In mid-December 2022, N1MM (version 1.0.9758) introduced a spectrum display option supporting the Elecraft K4 radio. Below is a walk-through on setting it up. For this to work, your radio will need to be connected to your local network. You can check this by tapping the Menu option and scrolling to the middle. You should see a valid IP address like in the screenshot above. If you use a firewall (e.g., Firewalla Gold), you will also need to allow communication between devices on the port 9200. ...

In September, I was invited to participate in “Birdwatch,” now known as “Twitter Community Notes.” The concept is a misleading tweet can be annotated with additional information or context by the community. Image source: XKCD 386: Duty Calls For example, consider this headline: Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd holds press conference after agency says it seized enough fentanyl to kill 2.7 million people. WFLA, October 21, 2022 ...

In addition to all of the geocaching I planned, I also thought I’d try activating some parks. Parks on the Air (POTA) is a program inspired by the ARRL National Parks on the Air program in 2016 by Sean Kutzko (KX9X) and Norm Fusaro (W3IZ). The idea is simply “everyday is field day,” that is, you take your radio crap to one of thousands of state or national parks, make ten contacts, and thus “activate the park.” Unlike Summits on the Air (SOTA), one can usually drive close enough to a park, which makes it more accessible. ...

Like a lot of folks, I had to cancel my travel plans in 2020 – this was a March trip to New York City — which left me with a moderate chunk of air travel credit$. I used some of them to visit the oldest geocaches Kansasand Colorado last year, but about by late December of last year, I still had a sizeable amount left and they were expiring. I couldn’t get my family to agree on anything, so I booked a trip to Boston in September. I hadn’t thought too deeply about it until July, when the trip seemed more likely than not to occur. ...

The cache lifecycle. I like that any cacher can log an appropriate needs maintenance/archive, but I find local cachers are often reluctant to do so. Nearly every time I travel, I find dozens of hides with super obvious issues (e.g., hasn’t been found in a few years, streak of DNFs, CO appears to have left the game). I’ve been logging a lot of NM on caches 3000km away so I don’t waste time on them when I’m there. Doing my part to clean up Charlottetown, PEI ...