W4HOD had a special guest at our March meeting. After dining on spaghetti, manicotti, lasagna, salad and dessert, we were treated to an antenna program by Darrell Penrod, K9MUG. Darrell presented several different wire antennas that will perform well and are easy to build.

Darrell Penrod, K9MUG

Thanks to Gene Harlin, KI4EEY for the photo

Jim Reisert-AD1C

I discovered a very good web site created by AD1C. of Colorado. The main page URL is http://ad1c.us/ . It is a combination personal page, ham radio page, and a great page on RTTY. He has written some very good, useful software programs and there is a link to them as well. One program I plan on trying for our club is the ADIF to CSV program. It converts ADIF files to comma separated values for exporting to Excel.

Thanks to a benevolent club member, W4HOD is the proud recipient of two WAS certificates. Both certificates were done 100% LOTW.

Mixed number 53,519 Date 09 March 2009

Digital (RTTY) number 734 Date 09 March 2009

I operated the BARTG RTTY Contest this past weekend. I used the club callsign W4HOD. Usually I have the pleasure of  the company of  members KF4OPX and KA4PKB, but they were not able to make this one. I had fun and made a few points.

Call: W4HOD
Operator(s): AA4YL
Station: W4HOD

Class: SOAB LP
QTH: Loachapoka, AL
Operating Time (hrs): 14

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Countries  Call Areas
-----------------------------------
   80:    0             0           0
   40:   58           7          14
   20:   84         12          14
   15:   10           3            4
   10:    0            0            0
-----------------------------------
Total:  152      22         32  Continents = 5  Total Score = 41,040

Club: Alabama Contest Group

Comments:

Great contest. My first one flying solo, but great fun. Thanks for all the
contacts. Thanks especially for those stations who followed the message layouts
from rttycontesting.com, it makes things much more organized.