QRV.

Worked UA3 and LY on 20m late Monday (early Tuesday UTC), my first HF QSOs since moving to Texas. Bands were awful but there seemed to be an opening over the pole to Eastern Europe, as I heard a few other stations in there as well; ER4DX was 20 over but didn't hear me. Later on Tuesday & Wednesday I worked TI, XE, KH6, VE and ES. Only 93 to go for DXCC from W5-land!

The Tarheel has been great so far. It's noisy (as verticals tend to be) but it's hearing stations that I'm not hearing at all with my stealth wire on the RX Ant input. I'm thinking now that I should have added the Ameritron SDC-201 controller to facilitate band switching, but for now I'm using the MFJ analyzer to tune the antenna without keying the K3.

Ham Radio Deluxe has become a true extension of my K3, operating without it is like attending a formal without pants. I finally dug out the old Dell (2.0 GHz P4 with 512MB RAM) and got it running, completely dedicated to amateur radio operations. Linda brought home a newer Dell from work with a 15" LCD monitor; not sure what processor is in this one but it isn't important -- what I'm using now is adequate, it's already set up with Wi-Fi card, HRD, and some other ham software, and I dread the thought of having to reconfigure another PC. (As a Mac guy, doing anything with Windows is torture. I think we should make Gitmo detainees administer a Windows network; they'll be begging for waterboarding before the end of the second day.)

So with the PC up and running, I had to clear off a bunch of stuff from my desk to make room for the monitor. Should have done this long ago as most of the stuff is seldom used (if ever). I removed the second '515 along with all the little dust-gathering peripherals to make room for the LCD and moved the mic boom over. Now I can actually see the K3, the HRD display, the power/SWR meter at the same time while speaking into a mic and typing without moving my head from side to side.

Now I need only figure out what to do with all the shit that is scattered all over the shack...

Getting RF into my audio chain, so I have to turn the Multi-RX off when transmitting and use headphones fed directly from the K3. Some sleuthing is in order; methinks it is a station ground issue because... well, there ain't none.