Last August I had some system integration issues with my station that kept me off the air for a number of months. May last log entry was from August 5th, with N2RJ on 6m FT8. I had a really tremendous 6m season in 2021, but my shack was in an epic wiring nightmare. Halfway through the season I integrated my Larcan 1KW and and also moved to using an Airspy R2 for my main RX.
The result of both integrations was rats nest of splitters, pre-amps, relays, control boards, and DC wiring. Work and life got busy, I pushed it aside and started dreaming of the 2022 Es season.
This past week I decided that I really missed having a working station, so I every so slow started to pull all the cables apart. At the same time I started integrating a new station computer, a mini system that has a ton of CPU and memory, but the size of a mac-mini.
A clean slate. I got the 6M station wired up to the power supply and antenna and audio interface. Simple, nothing fancy. I could heard signals again!
I was somewhat surprised at the level of local 6m FT8 activity, it seemed like much more than last winter. This is a good thing.
This Saturday evening, around 9pm local, I started to hear some mid-west stations calling and I managed to get a few in the log:
K9WKJ EN44
WO0Z EN34
K0DAS EN42
K9DLI EN42
AA9JS EN51
KX9X EN50
WA8TTM EM79
N0LWF EN10
WB8EJN EM48
K4XXX EM77
KC9VVX EN60
W4RXR EM65
N9FN EN60
KG5JJ EM26
XE2X EL06
WT9J EM59
K0GU DN70
NG1H EL06
KC0MAS EM28
WB8ZBT EM55
N3CY EM74
K0PHP EM38
K4NO EM64
N5BO EM60
Not bad for January!
