a short trip north

This past week work led me to Rockville, Maryland for a few days. As always, I had my trusty Yaesu FT-7800R with me in the car to help keep me company on the drive. While my other coworkers elected to fly, I chose to drive so that I could have some flexibility to visit friends and family who I have in the metro DC area.

As far as radio goes–I didn’t make time to program any of the area repeaters in my radio before I left, so I left the rig stuck on 146.52 MHz simplex throughout my trip. Three times over the past three days I was able to make simplex contacts. I sent out QSL cards today to these folks: WA4KEB, W5JMC, and KI4XH. The terrain around Washington, DC is not exactly conducive to long simplex rag chews, unfortunately. Quick chats with WA4KEB and W5JMC were all I could muster, but I had a nice, long chat with Fred KI4XH.

Fred and I made contact on my way to Ham Radio Outlet in Woodbridge, Virginia, where I was headed for some window shopping and to purchase some 15A PowerPoles. We chatted a bit about my travels to Rockville as well as other future work trips I have planned for the spring to Chicago, Anchorage, and rural Pennsylvania. It turns out that he has had extensive travel experiences in Alaska and would be happy to offer suggestions for places to eat and things to do during my time there. What a fruitful QSO!

This weekend I hope to pull out the soldering iron again and work on some aspects of the PSK-20 project. While I was gone, the LP filter I had ordered from W8DIZ at PartsAndKits.com arrived. It should be a quick build as there are only a few through-hole parts and two toroidal inductors to wind. The LP filter will go between the frequency synthesizer and the PSK-20 PC board to transform the signal into a nice sine wave.