Green Stamps

This is what passes for "green stamps" in Belarus these days.  This Belarus 100 ruble note is worth about one cent in US currency.  The beautifully printed cards are worth far more.  We normally expect $2 to cover postage and printing costs for QSL cards destined for overseas.  Let me see...that would be around BYR17,391!  I wonder how much it would cost to mail that many rubles.

Springtime Teases

Breakup this year seems slow to proceed.  An abundance of snow as well as days and nights toggling between 35-40 and 10-20F means a constant cycle of slow thaw and re-freeze.  Antennas weigh on our minds, Dan and I.  KL1JP has already begun construction of a 160 vertical, and a new Hexx beam arrived in the mail.  Planning for Field Day has begun in earnest, too.

Until the ground thaws, a lot of preparation for summer is in order.  Gather parts, place orders, line up volunteers.  As the snow parts, a few blades of grass are beginning to green.  Still, the ground is solid as cement just below the surface.  It's a tease.

A new QSL design has just been shipped to Gennady UX5UO.  Fantastic work at a reasonable price.

All Those JARL Awards

I happened to mention to Ken W6HF on Saturday morning that I was kind of interested in seeing which JARL awards KL2R qualified for.  After over 22k contacts in four years, I had quite a few cards from JA stations.  I had read some information previously about the various Japanese awards.  They were a bit of an enigma, and I had already started to comb out the JAs from the boxes of KL2R QSL cards.  Before you knew it, we were sorting and entering JA QSL information from 350 cards.  Saturday became a blur of on-air action as well as (mostly) playing CSI to figure out JCC, JCG, and other codes.  Ken and I became far more enlightened than we ever thought about Japanese administrative districts, from prefectures to -kus. 

In the end, KL2R remains two prefectures short of worked all.  I have a QSL in the mail to hopefully close one gap in Kyoto.  JCC is a slam-dunk.  Many challenges lie ahead.

Suddenly, I find myself a it obsessed with paper collecting.  DXCC mixed and DXCC 20m are awarded, and various certificates roll in for the usual contests.  Now I am looking at various bits of glitter to be added to the shack walls.  In part, building and operating KL2R has been a Herculean effort by N1TX and KL1JP, and the results speak for themselves.  Those CQ certificates and ARRL plaques on the wall demonstrate the payoff in a well-rounded combination of technology and teamwork.  Now I wonder what other achievements we have made, so I dig, as a paper-chaser does.