From WA1R,
All,
As you probably know by now, the Weather Service has issues a winter storm
watch for tomorrow night and Saturday. In addition, there is the possibility of
coastal flooding in southern New England, according to Skywarn and NWS.
Given this possibility, please guard 3.943 starting about mid-afternoon
tomorrow in case the storm becomes a reality and our assistance is needed
either by RACES or NWS or local/state EMA.
Given band conditions of late, I think it would be a good idea to keep 7.245
handy in a second VFO in case we need to run a net on that frequency.Also, I’d like to suggest here that we go into informal session beginning
between 1600 UTC and 1700 UTC Friday.
Also, I’d like to suggest a slight change in net operation, following this
week’s RACES drill. In future, if it becomes apparent that 3.943 +/-5 is too
crowded or there’s lots of QRM within 3 minutes of the start of the net, please
move up to 7.245 and run the net on 40. It was fairly clean Monday night.
I was able to hear the net well on my primary HF rig, but, I lost all phone
output. In fact, I am putting out plenty of power on AM/FM/CW, but, I have no
phone capability. I’m going to look through my service manual on this problem,
but, I may also be taking a run up to Groton Electronics tomorrow p.m. to drop
the offending rig off.
All this means is that I won’t have three HF stations for a bit, just two, the
FT-100 and my IC-706. I’ll probably use the 706 on HF as it has a the matching
longwire tuner. In place of my loop, I’ll be using a longwire and only 100
watts on 80 as that’s all the autotuner can handle.
73,
Marc, WA1R
mstern@wa1r.com