Happy New Year

 To all my readers I say Happy New Year! Julie and I welcomed the new year in our sleep as we toddled off to bed around 10 pm and it was lights out. Looking into this new year I would like to continue with my CW journey. With 10K cw contacts from 2023 under my belt one would think I would be done with CW BUT not so my ham friends. This is an art that I want to continue to grow at and to be honest the fun has not even come close to wearing off. 

The plans for the new year are to start more often to run in the CWops mini contests. This would help my running skills to improve a lot. You can practice running with software all you want but there is nothing like the real thing. The 1 hour CWops mini tests would give me live practice twice a week. 

I would like to move a bit more away from all computer code sending during contests and try to add more of me sending exchanges, repeats and sending the station call with my amazing Begali key. The difficult part for me is switching over to the key and then back to the keyboard to juggle N1MM+ logger. 

Now here is a stretch...in contesting there is what is known as single op 2 radio! You have one radio in one ear and the other radio in the other. I don't know how they do it but then again just over a year ago I just could not understand how op's hear one station in a mess of a pile-up. I practiced and low and behold your ears get used to how to hear a call or part of a call. I digress.....My Icom 7610 has two independent receivers and I believe I could start to practice that and who knows! 

As you all know I am retired and I want to keep up with my daily walks (weather permitting) and my 1 hour of stretching that I do each day. I never want to forget how important our health and well-being is.
Well, that's about it for the plans for 2024 but no rule says I can't build and add to the goals I have.