The First 100 Years Are The Hardest

I recently purchased a vintage, single lever Vibroplex key refurbished by Bill, WA4DDH.   The key looks great and works very well. With serial number #264554 this key was manufactured in 1970 according to WW7P's Vibroplex serial number collectors list. I like this key a lot and have been using it extensively over the past few weeks.   I did replace the old rubber feet which had hardened and moved around the desk to much for me.    Bill rescues these old keys which would otherwise be thrown away as junk and restores them to their previous glory.  The color scheme represents his personal flare to enhance the keys, and ‘naming’ a particular group of keys for the year that they were refurbished.    Green Thunder  is the color scheme for the keys he's refurbished in 2022. History of keys & paint theme.  This year marks 12 years of refurbished/restored Keys:  2022 GREEN THUNDER (Olive Green),  2021 GRAY GHOST (Battleship Gra...

The activation that very nearly wasn’t! For SYP Weekend I wanted to do an “All Mode Activation” at K-4423 Spring Creek Forest State Preserve in north east Dallas. I don’t think this is a real thing but I wanted to do it for the challenge. I’ve never done a CW activation and I hadn’t used FT8 much at all in the past 12 months. My plan was to activate a single park with at least 10 contacts on each of the three modes supported by POTA: SSB, CW and and Data (FT8). You can look at the pictures below, or read on if you’re interested in the details. I used a Yaesu FT-991a, a fully charged 12Ah Bioenno battery. For CW I brought my 3D Printed “CW Morse” single lever paddle wired as a cootie (also referred to as a side swiper). For FT8, I bought a cheap 11.6” Ebook from Microcenter (Evolve III Maestro). It’s a nice set up, not to slow, and the price includes Windows 10, 4GB Ram and 64 GB storage all for just under $50. I had an old iPhone in the closet from my previous upgrade and inserted the ...