AAØO Year in Review 2024

1/1/2025

Another very slow year for blog posts, I’ll try to do better in 2025. I did write two articles for the resurrected SPARC Gap club newsletter, we were finally able to get a volunteer and he eventually became the club secretary. I did complete one of last years goals and one from 2022, using the Hermes Lite 2 SDR to make a CW skimmer, which is also the topic of my first SPARC Gap article(pg 6). My 2nd article was on vanity callsigns(pg 4).

I attended Hamcation again in Orlando. I’m not sure I’m going to go this coming year, it’s literally exactly the same every year, same vendors in the same location, and I have very little on my list of ham radio things to buy. I do enjoy the speech at the contest dinner though. I ran the table at the SPARCFest, we had a few decent items and a couple not so great, which I enjoyed selling. I bought some transverters to do amateur satellites but found my rotator controller is broken, working on a replacement using my new 3D printer, but I bought in the antenna for the hurricane and haven’t put it back up yet. Also put together a really nice professional electronics workbench in my shack this year. Now for the stats:

• 1349 QSOs (20742 lifetime)
• 13,654 LoTW confirm QSOs
• DXCC Mixed 205 (+9) broke 200!
• DXCC 10m 86 (+19), 80m 67 (+4)

Goals:

• Finish my GPS Clock v2 project
• Finish the rotator controller and satellite antenna
• Launch a Pico Balloon, I have most of the parts except the balloons. My friend Lisa had one launched in June and it was online thru November
• Write more blog articles!