Bryce Salmi, KB1LQC writes on the New England QRP Club web site:
“The Chelmsford High School Amateur Radio Club had its early kickoff today. We set up under an outdoor gazebo two stations. Both running Yaesu FT-897D’s (One the schools and one ours) connected to computers and running ham radio deluxe for logging. One radio was connected to the dipole the other to the 6M beam and 2M vertical. We started around 12 PM and really started operating at about 1, after lunch which was a cookout…yes it was raining out but you can’t extinguish that desire to operate! We made a few contacts on 20M voice and 6M voice, however both bands were dead…
We ended up building a 2M J-pole antenna for use at the high school this year for monitoring the ISS SSTV (Yeah its good enough for the ISS SSTV, though not circularly polarized). Many of the members got to help out and cut the copper pipe and solder it together. In the picture it is on a bench right in the center… its hard to see but its there! We came back operated a little and then played some CHSARC Football with my little brother HIHI, we were soaked by the end of it, but it was so fun!
Then we jumped back on the radio and started PSK31 on 40M. That was when we made a few more contacts, actually most of out contacts! We got Matt, one of the unlicensed members very interested in PSK and talked to someone using Flex Radio which was right up his ally since Matt is very good with computers. Gillian talked to Belgium and a few of us talked around the US. [more]