K4QPL in IARU--NOT!

[James Jordan]

Thanks for all the Q's up to about 2300Z on Saturday. Couple of nice runs
on 20 with one 10 minute rate > 200. Probably around 250 Q's in all. Lots
of HQ mults, etc. etc.
Weather still looked good. So I stopped for dinner and left everything in
place to get back, clear up any 20M leftovers and get ready for 40M and
80M. During dinner and before any rain we saw a brilliant flash with
immediate thunderclap. You guessed it! Surge came in on the cable, blew the
Spectrum router, killed the shack computer stone dead, fried the USB
external adapter and wiped out the KIO3B card in my K3s. I thought also the
TV cable box but just the cable splitter was blown and the box was OK.
Fortunately it must have hit a tree somewhere close and not my tower. Wire
antennas, SixPak, SteppIR and rotator all OK
Spectrum came this morning, replaced their stuff. I rearranged the
expedition computer we take to VP5M with local stuff but my IARU log is
probably gone forever and several hours of fun operating. Probably not much
other important stuff as most is on the AWS cloud server.
Could have been worse I guess....No club points lost.
73,
Jim K4QPL