Did you miss the West Florida QRP gathering today??? Well, I didn’t! Today’s meeting was held at the Tampa TBARS/TARC clubhouse, which is a WONDERFUL place for a bunch of hams to gather! I’m not sure what the big draw is.... the hot dog machine or the big tri-band beam... but the beam works very well with the new K2 SSB board! Steve Cohen, N3OIE, got a 5-7 from Slovenia on 10 meters at about 4 watts. “Yes, very nice QRP signal, how high is your tower? Back to you.”

The day was full -- people coming and going. Mike Maiorana, KU4QO, brought a nibbler, copperclad PCB and some stuff... so 5 or 6 of us tried our hand at “Manhattan” style construction of a little oscillator. Mike made one with an air coil inductor, Steve made one with a toroid, just “guessing” at the number of turns and low and behold they were dead on the same freq! The real contest was to see whose was UGLIEST -- I win. We are gonna expand it next time with a variactor and crystal. If you want to try your hand at pad construction before you buy, you should come try this. Mike is subtle... I’ve learned more from him in three meetings than 18 years of school. AND he cooked the hamburgers!

Steve brought his LAB quality equipment (as usual) scope, freq. counter, and signal generator... and we all lined up to tweak our band pass filters and get our offsets dead on for various rigs. Fred Kalt, W2XN, now has a KC-1 freq. readout and keyer with a working mute feature, and he had solved his drift prior to coming... YOU SHOULD SEE HIS WORK! Beautiful. I continue to be amazed at the craftsmanship on some of these things. (Roger is still tops IMHO.)

Steve “blue printed” my K2 (#463)... my BFO was low and we had to swap a cap to get it dead on, then tweaked the band pass coils on his scope using the sig. generator. Steve is always a lot of help and a great teacher! He was a K2 beta-tester and ‘splains things so even I can understand -- most of the time. I’m pretty dense.

Bill brought his .38 Special. Other rigs there were: NorCal 40a, Norcal 20, SW40+ (Steve, are you done with the SWL DSW rig?) Bobby Floyd, KD4HVD had a new homebrew paddle, complete with leg strap and snap connections -- cool -- and worked very well! Bud Murphy, AC4MY, had some RARE DX QSL’s, he joked that the card was bigger than the country!

I’m not sure how many attended... but we ate all the cooked burgers. We didn’t get around to giving out the door prizes, so maybe next month I’ll get lucky!

Thanks to all who came and shared the wealth of knowledge and fun. See you next month on the FIRST Saturday (instead of the second.)
72
-MAC-
AF4PS