It's Ham Field Day!

And I've made my first contact on HF. The good ol Jeff and I checked out the Sunnyvale ARES site, but they were being pretty boring, so we checked out another site down by Rancho, and man were they jumping. They are running 8 radios, plus their satellite and "Get on the Air" radios. When we got there, the wife of one of the guys was nice enough to walk us around and show us all the different stations, which was SO nice of her. It was awkward at the SARES with everyone completely ignoring us. So after seeing the entire installation, Jeff and I were led to the GOTA radio, where they let us unlicensed/Technician license shmucks have a go at the HF bands, normally only open to General and Extra Plus licensees. Jeff got three contacts: British Columbia, Arizona, and somewhere else. By the time I was getting on, we were running short on time because I needed to get back to work picking up real estate signs, but I managed to get one contact in Illinois, which is REALLY cool. I'm about to have dinner, then Jeff and I are going to head out again to check them out while they're working the 80/160 meter bands, which only open up once the sun sets. Update: So we headed back up to Mora hill around 10pm, and after a few hours chewing the fat with the guys, two of the operators turned to us and said they wanted to take a break. So Jeff and I got to work the 40m band from midnight till about 1:30am when they switched down to 80m and took over again. It was quite a bit of fun, and we even managed to get QSLs with a guy in Alaska, and another in Hawaii.

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