12 Days of QRZ

I've been doing the '12 days of QRZ' again this year and managed to get the award yesterday - I started two day late as I forgot about the award. So far I had endorsements for 80m, 40m, 30m and 20m, and today I added 17m and 10m. A couple of log entries were the same stations over two or three days, I'm not actually stalking you! It's fun and frustrating at the same time, logging, sending to QRZ and LoTW and hoping for a match. A few 60m QSOs from yesterday were from stations that had previously logged to LoTW and now are not... but never mind. Just one more day for 60m and 15m to get 12 days in each and the associated endorsements. The award updates automatically once you get sufficient days and go to the awards page again, Now then, 12m. I did not realise last year, nor this year that it is included, as are all bands. You need to go to the bottom of the awards check page and click on 'all bands'. So this year I added 3 days (so far) of 12m, 9 to go. I've never heard anything on 160m, the…

I had a go at QRZ.com's 12 Days of QRZ challenge which began in December. QED, all you needed to do was make one acknowledged QSO per day for 12 days. I concentrated just on FT8. But there are endorsements for 12 QSOs over 12 days per each band in the challenge: 160, 80, 60, 40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 10, 6 and 2m. I managed all bands between 80 and 15, can't transmit on 160, 6 was always closed when I tried, and 2m would only yield one or two close contacts anyway. So I ignored those. I had had little success with 10m but later decided to have a go. Overall 10m seemed to come alive most days and all went well until the last couple of days where there were plenty of QSOs but very few acknowledgements in the QRZ logbook, some of which were only as a result of importing form LOTW. A table of this for no particular reason: So I had to work those last two days. I had a go at FT4 as well and one each of the 'Stars' for the 2nd and 3rd February were from FT4 QSOs. There, a little…

So I now have a Creed 444 teleprinter. I've been after a teleprinter for about 2 years now. When I was still at school I used to buy, strip, repair and sell Creed 7E's - maybe 7 or 8 passed through my hands and on to others for pocket money. Back then I had two 7Es for myself, as well as a tape reader, tape punch and a valved TU hanging off a B40 / B41 setup. Weight was not an issue in my basement workshop... But I've never had one of the more modern units like the 444 (yes, modern is a relative term here!) Having manhandled the beast from the car to the workshop I now need to learn how it is put together so I can be sure it's not going to fly into bits when I power it up. However, hopefully I'll get it running and then get an interface set up. I doubt it will be allowed in the shack (aka the little bedroom) so it may well have to run in the workshop - but that does give the excuse to acquire a nice old comms receiver to go with...