CQ WPX SSB

For most of you, the title of this entry is meaningless. What it means is the ham radio contest was on this weekend.

Now you're probably wondering how you have a ham radio contest. Do hams all get together in one place with their radios and go "ooh" and "aah", and judge who's got the best one? No, what happens is we all try to contact as many people as possible over a certain period. We exchange a signal report and a serial number. The reason for the serial number is to cross check the logs when the entries are checked, otherwise you could just say you contacted someone when you didn't.

As you can see below, we got the rabbit's ears up and the reception is much better now.



That's Donna in the picture feeding the possums. I was actually on the roof of our shed when I took this one, cutting some flowers from some of the trees for them.

Anyway, over the course of the weekend we had 92 contacts. Some of them were with the same station, but on different bands. We had contacts from as far afield as Korea, Malaysia, Chile, USA, Barbados and Jamaica. Unfortunately we didn't get any European stations, the closest we got Europe was the Ukraine.

You can see in the picture my callsign is sitting on top of one of the radios. That's so Laurie didn't forget himself and use his own callsign for the contest. As we were working as a team we just used mine. With the number of contacts we made though, Laurie will probably forget next time he's on the radio and use mine. Not that we made many contacts, we were small fry compared to some of the people competing, but there's a lot more in my log than there were before the contest.



Even though there's a fridge in this next picture, don't be fooled. We didn't hijack the kitchen table for the weekend. We were downstairs next to where I usually have my radios. Those leftover crusts you can see just past my chin aren't mine by the way. I always eat my crusts that's why I've still got a lot of hair.



Now the contest is over and we know the new radios and antenna work I can stop procrastinating and get stuck into my uni assignments.

I didn't play radios all weekend either, we had a couple of rescues this weekend. This afternoon Donna and I took a young dove back to be released that she and my niece (Laurie's ten year old daughter) rescued yesterday. From there we went to someone elses house to pick up a young galah.