Well, that went pretty well — about two weeks of after-work operation on  17m FT8 with a low-hanging end-fed dipole and 25W, and I pushed my DXCC count on 17m over 100. Thanks to 9G5AR from Ghana for putting it...

This weekend, Russian-ARISS transmitted SSTV images of satellites hand-launched from the ISS. They used a high-resolution mode, PD-120 transmitted FM on 145.800. I was set up for FT8, but switched over for one pass and captured this image. My process...

The move back to the US will happen at the end of July, but I will need to pack up most of the equipment in the next few weeks. So, with time remaining, I’ve been thinking about I can get...

After I took the hexbeam down, sanded it, painted it and packed it away, I still had a G450 rotor on my hands, so I thought I would try my hand at satellite operation. Over last weekend, I literally lashed...

I arrived back in Madagascar late in the evening last week after a brief vacation in Réunion. The next morning, I fired up the rig to see what was going on in the CQ WW WPX SSB contest and rotated...

This year, I experienced the French IF comp not as a reviewer, but as an entrant. I’m ecstatic to report that not only did I survive the comp, but I came in second in a field of five thanks to...

My LNR precision trail-friendly end-fed halfwave antenna has been my go to antenna for SOTA and other field operations for several years. It is compact, easy to deploy in a tree or on a telescoping mast, and it gets good...

I had pushed for five peaks in one day, trying to break my previous record of three that I had managed last year in France. While I got into position on El Sereno and made a contact, I did not...

The fourth mountain on my tour of easily accessible peaks just south of San Francisco took me to a vineyard parking lot in Saratoga. The trail towards the peak departs from the topmost parking lot at 37.259823,-122.066786. This activation was a...

This was the third peak of the day for me.  It lies along a road that runs atop a ridge. I found a cutout along the side of the road and walked past a gate to a clearing next to...

Continuing my road trip around the southern part of the San Francisco Bay area, I headed along CA route 236 to 37.196014, -122.194314, where China Grade Road cuts across on both sides. As mentioned in another post, you don’t want...

As in previous years, after attending a medical conference that runs Thursday to Saturday, I had Sunday mostly free for SOTA. This year, I thought it would be fun to rent a car and try to activate multiple peaks: W6/NC-209,...

I didn’t make it up this mountain, but I’m posting about it to let people know why it has never been activated. In laying out the itinerary for this vacation, I considered that I’d have one day for SOTA. Consequently,...

Over the Christmas and New Year holidays, my family rented an airbnb house in Icod de los Viños, a rural town along the northern coast of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. During that week, I reacquainted myself with driving a...

The same day that I activated Hollenstein (OE/NO-149), I activated this peak, also within a short drive of Vienna (about 50km). The site indicated as “Hoher Lindkogel” on GoogleMap does not agree with the coordinates on the SOTA site. On GoogleMap,...

I rented a car and visited two sites on my last trip to Austria on November 4th: Hollenstein and Hoher Lindkogel. The weather was still reasonably warm at the time, and neither site had snow. I started with the Hollenstein...

I played through all of the entries in this year’s IFcomp during the first month, so it’s been at least a couple weeks since the last game. I’d like to share a few thoughts about some of the entries now...

This year’s crop of games is large enough to be divided up into any number of categories by subject, e.g., RPGs, sci-fi, murder mysteries, or structurally, e.g., parser-based, limited-parser, hypertext, CYOA, etc. I’d like to propose a number of new...

I just posted my 79th review for this IFcomp, which means that I’ve now commented on every entry. I tried to get through them quickly to provide feedback early enough in the competition to be useful to both authors and...

This Quest game is spread out in four dimensions. It is set on a university campus, and the protagonist is an OWUPSOABD (over worked, underpaid, stressed-out graduate student), who discovers that his mentor is missing and suspects that it has...

I like role playing games, but I am not a big fan of simulations of role playing games. Ironically, I found this simulation of a simulation of a role playing game fun. This was not the highest-end RPG in the...

This is a lightly implemented parser game written in Adrift. I found gameplay impossible without the walkthrough, and the walkthrough itself contains errors. I bailed after about fifteen minutes, so my evaluation is limited. This is one of those games...

This is an obsessively detailed parser-based sci-fi story that took me the full two hours to play, albeit not all in one sitting. The richness of the game’s background, character backstories, and the number of rooms and detailed objects in...

Finally, after years of being harassed by the java updater, something that needs java to run! This program wins my own personal Banana of Discord. On one hand, a tremendous amount of work has gone into its production and it...

The story opens in a familiar setting: a witch and her cat. This is a short twine story premised on the commonly accepted wisdom that cats have nine lives. In this story, Nyna the cat is sent on a mission...