KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

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A busy weekend at KB6NU

Posted: 16 Mar 2021 08:56 AM PDT
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/kb6nu...m_medium=email


This last weekend was a very busy on here at KB6NU. I attended the QSO
Today Virtual Expo, chatted with some local ham friends on Zoom, and worked
three state QSO parties.

On Friday night, I checked into the QSO Today Virtual Ham Expo. There wasnt
a lot going on, but I sat in on the live streaming of the Ham Radio
Workbench and Ham Radio 2.0 podcasts and wandered around the booths a bit.
As you might expect, there werent many people in the booths. The busiest
one that I dropped in on was the CWops booth. I think there were four or
five of us in there.

On Saturday morning, before the Virtual Expo got started, I dropped into a
Zoom meeting that takes place every Saturday morning. Before the pandemic,
this meeting used to take place at a local bagel shop, but now we do it
online. For some reason, its called The Clinic. The Clinic got started when
some guys would join Dik, KC8UXT, at his favorite breakfast spot, Barry
Bagels, every Saturday morning.

Sadly, Dik is now an SK, but the Clinic continues. We get started about 9
am Eastern time and BS about ham radio for a couple until about 11 am.Â*
Feel free to drop in and join the Zoom meeting.

This Saturday, I left the Clinic at 10 am to make some contacts in the
Oklahoma QSO Party, the first of three state QSO parties over the weekend.
By the time I got set up it was 10:15, and over the next half hour, I
managed to make five QSOs. That was enough to qualify my participation for
the State QSO Party Challenge.

At 11 am, it was back to the Virtual Expo. Over the next 5-6 hours, I
attended presentations and did some booth duty in both the ICQPodcast
booth. I say booth duty, but it was really just chatting with the
ICQPodcast guys and the occasional listener.

As you may have heard, there were some software problems with the Virtual
Expo. Some attendees had problems with their login credentials and some of
the sessions didnt work quite right. The sessions on ionospheric
propagation and machine learning were two that I wanted to attend, but
unfortunately, they never started.

Several sessions did work correctly, though, including the session on
amateur radio branding. That session was moderated by Martin, M1MRB, of the
ICQPodcast, and was quite a good discussion. Fortunately, all of the
presentations were pre-recorded and will be available to attendees for the
next 30 days on Virtual Expo website. After that, theyll be uploaded to the
Virtual Expo YouTube channel.

After eating some dinner, it was back to the shack, to make some contacts
in the Idaho QSO Party. After making a couple of contacts on 40m, I
switched to 80m and made a third one. Since I dont do very well to the
west, I figured that was enough, and shut down the station for the day.

More troubles on Sunday

At 11 am Sunday morning, it was back to the Virtual Expo. Unfortunately,
the Expos software woes continued.Â*I think that what happened in the
session that I was “hosting� was a great example of how things went wrong.
I’m not sure exactly why the organizers did this, but they decided to tack
on a title screen to each video and run that screen along with some
elevator music for three minutes. That got old pretty fast, so the speaker
and I decided to start the video before making the session go live, then
making the session live after it had run for two minutes. Bad move. When we
did make the session live, no one could see the video. Stopping and
re-starting the video did not work.
Someone in the audience suggested ending the session and restarting it.
That sounded good, but I didn’t have a good feeling about this. One of the
sessions that I had wanted to attend on Saturday had ended prematurely, and
I was guessing they had a similar problem with their video and tried the
same maneuver. That session never took place. I said as much, but the
speaker wanted to try it so we did. Of course, we couldn’t get the session
re-started after doing that.
The speaker had a link to the online support, so we tried that. I was going
to say that these guys were pretty clueless, but would be unfair. They were
being asked to support a system that was poorly designed and had lots of
bugs. They did the best they could, but they just really couldn’t do much.
After about a half hour, they decided just to add a session with the same
title. A little more than 35 minutes after the session was to start, we
were able to start the second version of the session. The rest pretty much
went off without a hitch.
EXCEPT, my presentation on teaching online classes was to start an hour
after this session that I was hosting. Since the session started late, I
told the speaker that I was going to have to cut out early and head over to
my session. WRONG! A host could not leave a session that he or she was
hosting until the session ended. Nor, could the support people transfer the
host status from me to the speaker. I even tried quitting the browser and
then signing in to the Virtual Expo again. As soon as I signed in, the
software put me in the session that I was hosting. ARRRGGGGHH.
Fortunately, I had the phone number for the host of my session. I phoned
him and told him to start the video, and I would join the session as soon
as I could. Fortunately, there were not many questions in the first
session, and as soon as I ended the session, the software transferred to my
session, where the video was just finishing up. So, I was able to field
questions there. Alls well that ends well, I guess.

After giving my presentation, I hung out in the ICQPodcast booth for a
while, but I had one more QSO party to work this weekend: the Wisconsin QSO
Party. Over the next hour and a half, I logged nearly 50 QSOs for a score
of just over 3,000 points.

At that point, Id had plenty of ham radio over the weekend. My wife had
been itching to wash our car, so we hopped in and went to one of those
wash-it-yourself places. After getting the car looking like new (well,
almost like new), we got some takeout and had a nice dinner. All in all, it
was a great weekend!

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