As 2013 comes to an end I thought it would be interesting to give it a good long look in the rearview mirror. Here’s what I found.
At the end of December this blog hit 160 posts in total. That number dates back to 2010 when I moved this blog to WordPress. It looks like I’m a writer and a storyteller.
I see that in January I entered the ARRL RTTY Roundup as my very first RTTY contest. This happened just as I’d completed 200 confirmed countries on CW for DXCC and the CQ DX Award. Good reason to move on to a new mode when I’d pretty much topped out what my 100 watts and verticals can do on CW.
I see that I also won the Flex 1500 in a Lone Star DX Association raffle at the January meeting. My review blog post on the 1500 is one of the more popular posts on this website. In February I started my stories about moving from an Apple based ham shack to a Windows-based shack. That naturally had to follow getting into RTTY in a serious way with N1MM, MMTTY, and 2Tone.
It looks like March and April were focused on website redesign, which I did twice just to make sure I got it right!
In May I was off to the K2BSA Dayton Drill and the Hamvention. That set everything up really well for the K2BSA operation at the 2013 National Scout Jamboree in July. I also hyped my Radio Scouting article in the June issue of QST Magazine.
The building effort in 2013 was restricted to some CAT6 cables for rig control, posted in May, along with FSK cables in August. Finally, October saw some stories about Jamboree on the Air with the full USA report issued in December.
Along the way, I retired from the BSA at the end of June and began my solopreneur writing and blogging shop at PathForeWord. Glad to see that I’m making progress with both accepting retirement and making things happen for my career encore in writing.
So there you have it. A jam packed 2013 with fun things happening in amateur radio and some monumental life changes. Can’t wait to see what happens in 2014.
