So my first attempt to take out the QDX on its first POTA ended up in failure because I forgot the power cord on Tuesday Jan 6th.  I was kind of bummed but it is what it is and POTA was not the primary reason for my trip to McHenry that day.  I rectified that problem and did the typical ham thing of making extra cords and placing thing in backup locations.  Yes there is a set of barrel cords in the car now just in case.

I rectified this on Friday afternoon Jan 9th and did a simple setup in one of the parking lots, very serene and tranquil spot where I could hear a woodpecker pecking one of the trees.

I used my usual Subaru POTA station setup for the winter but this time I used the 20m Hamstick with a mag mount on the roof.  I was able to get an SWR of 1.26:1.

This was the first outing for my recently build QRP Labs QDX Rev 4 80-20m transceiver.  On the bench with 12.3v I was able to get 3w out on 20m, but I used a new battery that had a barrel connector on it and it was not fully charged as it measured 12v.  I was able to get out with 2.10 to 2.01W and that remained constant for a little over and hour of solid FT8.  When I got home, the battery voltage dropped down to 11.8v.  I was very happy that the QDX remained cool to the touch!

I was amazed how soon I hit a pileup on 20m FT8 and ended up with 42 QSOs in just over an hour.  One of them ended up being a duplicate but did land two P2P contacts and one in Spain.

I ran a slightly different setup than when I use my IC-705.  I did not use SDR-Control for ICOM, instead I did USB-C into the QDX and ran WSJT-X Improved with the Alternate Layout and Gridtracker.  All of these are great pieces of software and I support and use all of them regularly.

So now I need to finish up the QMX+ that has landed on the workbench.  As always I am using Wavelog running in Docker on my Raspberry Pi 5.  Guest view is here.

Happy New Year and 72 de W9BLN

Tomorrow morning I head out to the W9DXCC, this will be the third one I have attended.  I am sure I will learn something and hopefully walk away with a nice door prize.  https://w9dxcc.com/program/

I won’t be attending the banquet, instead I will heave over to the Vintage Computer Fest Midwest on my way home.  https://vcfmw.org. I always like this event but have not been able to go for the last few years.

I moved my Tempest weather station, still not getting the best wind reports but the rain and temperature data is better.  It was getting dripped on by the neighbors tree before and reporting more rain than there actually was!

Here is the URL —> https://tempestwx.com/station/70356/

# This is a comment in Python
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Obligatory first post, of course in Python 3.x.