A while ago (somewere end 2008) I started practicing morsecode. Every day I practiced for about half an hour and ones a week I joined my fellow HAM’s on the air and practice with a teacher. For many weeks that kind of worked. But then the teacher had a major lightning strike in his antenna and many of his stuff was blown to pieces. From then on I told myself I would practice every night except the weekends.
Of course that wasn’t the case. In the meantime I picked up a very nice morse training program pointed out by G4ILO.
Some nights I was able to put myself behind the computer for a minute or 10/15 and train a little. But it was not enough to catch the drift. Last weekend I’ve got a new idea for a good training moment!
Every day I have to travel 1,5 hours to work and back. Because I have to travel in rush hours and in the busiest area in the Netherlands, I travel by train. That gives me 3 hours per day to kill some time. Mostly I spend it reading, listening podcastst or just sleeping. But it would be the perfect moment to practice morse code!
So I called a friend who owns a unused netbook and asked him if I could use it for a few months. No problem, he answered. I picked it up last night and this morning I’ve practice morse code for about 45 minutes! Maybe this evening when I travel home, more training minutes will be added. I hope this will lead to a much faster progress.

HolidayStill one week of work and then I’m two weeks off on holiday. The first week I’ll be in northern Italy (JN46NA) in a small village Porlezza near the lake of Lugano as I/PA1JIM/P (26th September – 3th October) and the next week I’ll be at JN24XM (Hautes Alpes, France) as F/PA1JIM/P. I’ve read in propagation for the end of this month that there will appear a lot of sunspots. So that’s just perfect for me on my holiday spot! I’ll drag along my TS-50, AT-50, a WiMo Magnetic Balun (or actually an UnUn) and a piece of 15 meter wire. Hopefully enough to be on all the active bands.

Hope to work you!

73 de PA1JIM

A long last to-do on my list: apply for LOTW. Last week I read the instructions on the ARRL-website (also available in Dutch, I might add) and followed the line. I thought I had to upload my driver license and amateur license, but it turn out that I have to send a copy of both via snailmail.
When I dropped the enveloppe the other day my guess was I wouldn’t here anything within at least 3 weeks.
But, surprise surprise! This morning ARRL dropped me an email with the approval certificate! Whow, that was only about one week or so!
So tonight I’ll try to import my log in LOTW. Finally! Now I can see for sure how many DXCC entities I already scored….