You end up on a lot of roofs. I was mentioning how we’d been up on top of Bradford House in Providence (It’s known I believe as Sister Dominica Manor) and on top of a college building putting up repeaters.
So we were asked if we’d like to see the setup on the roof. A picture was snagged of course I’m the 2nd from the right facing toward the church tower. The gentleman in the striped shirt he does the national weather service announcements you hear on 162.400MHz in these parts.
So this was my first Amateur Radio Field Day in years. I got there around 11AM and stayed until about 5:30PM. I couldn’t get there for the test session at 8AM though – I’m told there was only one person who took the test.
Here’s the setup:
That was the 6m band setup. I was somewhat chagrined that there was no CW work this time round. Perhaps next year I sort of prefer Morse Code for contest work. And a decent set of headphones. That’s a must for CW.
Got to be the person responsible for logging 20m band contacts. Then I got to work 40m phone. And being 40m requires a general or above – I was good with my extra class license.
I did get to show I was an amateur radio dinosaur though – and instructing in the fine art of noise reduction using the old Squelch control and then the Noise Reduction button on the Kenwood TS-2000. DSP noise reduction is interesting. I do like the radio though and may purchase on in the future.
And as is the case with lots of things, even with food being there we only got about a dozen or so people there today. Even got to experience drift in phonetics – with a Mike/Mario swap. Didn’t say anything though just chalk it up to personal flair I guess.
Got to see the rooftop setup for PEMA – all I can say is first they’ve got a decent set of antennas and the grounding system for lightning arresting is awesome.
Did see some old friends – there’s Brian K1PVD who I know from my years at the Attorney General’s office – he was doing IT for the RI State Police. Then Mike N1BEE .
So this year I’ll be visiting the PEMA field day activities. It should be interesting as I haven’t been to a field day exercise in many years.
Probably because I let my membership in W1AQ lapse. And I sort of went quiet in the hobby for some time. I mean the net and it’s fun sort of diminished the value of being on the radio as much.
But I find myself at least clipping the radio on my belt and listening. Occasionally throw my call out and talk to a few folks. I forgot how fun that can be.
I should go dig out my VE creds – they’re doing a test session but at 8AM on a Saturday is a little too early for me.
And I have already programmed in the simple frequency on my Yaesu VX-7RB: }
It has to be The Pink Panther Strikes Again. It’s on Amazon Prime. Just the madness of Dreyfuss is enough. It’s awesome though – the last scene where he winks out of existence.
It’s humor that I love.
So on my MD-380 I had put the New England code plug on it. But I noted nothing in RI was included – no zone, no repeaters nothing.
So put in a bunch of repeaters – except years of experience bit me in the ass. You see I had known for example that 449.225 here in RI used to have a CTCSS code of 67.0 – not anymore. It changed. I was wondering why I could hear conversations on the repeater but could never trip the repeater myself. Wrong CTCSS. Teach me to check the online repeater directory next time.
That’s been solved so now the Quahog Net aka N1JBC Net is active on my MD-380 and one of the nodes on the KA1RCI net – one in West Greenwich, RI which is roughly 25 miles from here. I get perfect coverage from that baby here in Providence – so on 5W PEP on 70cm band I can hit a repeater 25 miles away from where I am.
But then I shouldn’t be surprised – one place I lived I was on the fourth story of the building and I could easily hit the Boston based repeater some 45 miles away.
So usually you marinate the meat in soy sauce, then there’s garlic, ginger, broccoli, red bell pepper etc.
I didn’t have the red bell pepper. So what I did was marinate chopped up chicken in soy sauce for about 40 minutes. Cooked some brown rice at the same time.
Once that was done I put down some avocado oil and cooked the chicken. Then removed and put down some chopped garlic and chopped ginger. Then in goes the broccoli along with about 1.5 cups water. Cover and steam – I like broccoli a little crunchy – go at 5 minutes and test until you’re happy. Then a shake or two of red pepper flakes. Re add the cooked chicken and then the usual mix is soy sauce, oyster sauce, corn starch and chicken stock. I varied it – soy sauce, corn starch, chicken stock and white wine.
Put that in the hot pan and let it thicken and let the broccoli cook a bit more.
It was awesome. I’ll keep this one in mind for the future.
So as I’ve mentioned in a past post I run Steam, VNES and Project64 on my Windows 10 machine. And I had listed all the games I had installed.
So been binge driving in Mario Kart – great fun. As you can see from the images you have more control on the 50cc side than the 100cc or 150cc sides.
First the top 3 players are ranked 2-1-3:
Now the sprinkled stars:
Now on first play I scored Bronze. Just the way the cookie crumbles I guess:
But with subsequent play – I finally took the gold cup.
The best method – mash down the D key – on the keypad i think that’s the A button and avoid the bananas and solid blocks.
Next I’ll try the next up levels beyond mushroom cup. Those introduce more obstacle avoidance.
