[AK-VHF] Happy New Year

[Paul Kiesel]

Howdy, all you avid AVGers <smile>.

I got the new year started with a failed elevation actuator for my 50 MHz EME antenna. Fortunately, we have a sunny day which allows work on the tower. I'll just forego watching the bowl games on TV this time. Beyond fixing the elevation mechanism, I have written a list of things to do in the beginning couple of months of 2013 (I'm not going to call them resolutions because I plan to get them all done!). I have too much stuff piled up in the shack, so some of it needs to get moved temporarily to the crawl space under the house. It's actually not a crawl space, but an unfinished daylight basement - another project destined for completion.

Anyway, all these considerations brought to mind the upcoming VHF contest, which is less than two weeks away. So, this being a national holiday for most if not all of us, if you find yourself thinking it might be better not to be such a couch potato, you might consider getting your radios and antennas set up for the contest. Find out who might be planning to do a rove in the contest or maybe think about doing one yourself this time for a change. Now would be a good opportunity to set up some skeds with distant stations for some real weak signal attempts for contest points, multipliers and grid squares for the AVG awards.

Here is a link to the AVG Contests page:

http://www.qsl.net/a/ak-vhf/Contests/

73 and all the best in 2013!

Paul, K7CW
AVG Contest Guy