No time like the present, so let’s start with the past week and get caught up.

Last weekend was Winter Field Day, I joined the crew from the Kalamazoo Amateur Radio Club (W8VY) out at Fort Custer Recreation Area’s beautiful River Side Cabin and setup a 2 station operation. The cabin is gas heated, but other than that is rustic, no water or power. I went out friday night to cook, camp, and have some fellowship with friends from the club. It was a great evening of meeting new people and sharing stories.

We brought along a small gas generator to provide power for our stations and we setup 2 dipole antennas , 1 was homebrewed linked di-pole made by Randy Mead (KE8R) the other was an all band military surplus antenna made by Harris (I think, I’d have to check) supplied by Chuck (WD8AXA). We made a number of contacts while setting up and checking equipment and settled in to start the contest.

I cooked up a big pot of chili mac for the crew and stayed as late as I coud, but unfortunately I had work starting at Midnight so I had to leave around 5pm to make sure I got enough rest before my maintenance window started. Between cooking for the crew and then packing up I didn’t get a chance to operate alot or document the contest, but I still had a bunch of fun hanging out with the crew. To be honest it was such a whirl of activity packing up that I forgot to see where our number of contacts were at when I left.

The work week itself was a blur of technical issues and leadership meetings and then trying to clean up and re-organize post last weekends camping trip. While this week has been non-stop and exhausting the leadership meetings really gave me some hope and postive energy about the direction were headed so I tried to ride that wave this weekend.

This weekend I launched the new website for the Southwest Michigan Amateur Radio Team (K8KZO), another local amateur radio club. It’s by no means done, but it’s migrated enough to go live and make room for my own site on this domain. I then built up this site and kicked off my first few pages and posts. This week I’d like to get back to some of my daily practices and the usual projects. I’ll do my best to try to remember to slow down and document those things here so you can share the journey!