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If you go to the Bing front page today (and you should because the picture is great), one of the quotes they list is from Oprah, who says, "Biology is the least of what makes one a mother." I have to agree. My wife and daughter are both mother to three of our grandkids just as much as their birth mothers are. Maybe more. Happy Mother's Day, Sharleen and Tina.

And happy Mothers' Day to all of you mothers out there. The ones who take on foster children who would otherwise be lost in the system. The ones who gladly shoulder the burden of raising grandkids or nieces and nephews for whatever reason. The ones who sit outside at a Starbucks watching the crowd go by and wondering, is that the child I had to give up for adoption when I was too young to handle motherhood? And yes, to those dads who are mother to their kids as well because their wife is no longer there. And of course to all the traditional mothers who are doing the best they can with the tools they have at hand to raise kids that are happy, healthy and well-adjusted.

Yesterday the temperature here flirted with 90 degrees. We Seattleites are not used to such scorching temperatures. You Texans and Georgians may laugh at such a statement, but this weekend was the first time all year the temperature got above 80 for any length of time.

On Saturday I splurged for a $3 movie for the four of us (me, my wife, my daughter and granddaughter). "I'd like four tickets to air conditioning, er, Hunger Games," I told the box office attendant. She just laughed. We chose Hunger Games in part because it's a good movie that we'd already seen and knew we would enjoy, and in part because it was the longest movie the theater was offering that day.

This is a dodge we used to pull all the time in Texas when they had $1 and $2 movies. We'd grab a few bucks, pack up the kids and spend the day watching movies. Good movies, bad movies, silly movies, movies from Italy or France, movies we'd seen before, we didn't care. They could have advertised an empty theater for $1 an hour and we'd probably have paid it. And bought popcorn to go along with it.

Yesterday we went to (air-conditioned) church, changed our clothes, packed up some food, grabbed the Igors and went for a drive. We had planned to go up toward Lake Goodwin, but a whole bunch of other people had the same idea, so we kept driving and ended up at Deception Pass State Park at the north end of Whidbey Island. The picnic area was cool and shady, there was water for the kids to play in and around, and everyone had a pleasant time. Much better than we would have if we'd have been sitting at home grousing and sniping at each other because of the heat.

The temperature is supposed to spike near 80 today and then be down in the 70s over the next week or so. I sure hope so. Weather like this reminds me of why we were so happy to get out of Texas.

I hate nights when I can't sleep. Since I am often tired and fall asleep readily, situations where I can't go to sleep are puzzling and frustrating, especially when I really want to sleep. Like last night, when for the second night in a row I didn't get to bed before midnight.Then about 4 in the morning Igor the Younger came in whimpering because something had woken him up and my wife went out to take care of him. It was just enough to wake me up, so I got up, went to the bathroom, went back to bed . . . and couldn't get to sleep for nothin'. I think I finally conked out somewhere around 5:15, but before I did I reset the alarm to get an extra half hour of sleep. I'm feeling it now though, and hope I manage to make it through the workday, aided by my personal specialist Dr Pepper.

Igor the Younger and his toolkit I described a few days ago helped with a mad science project yesterday. I pulled out the computer screw connection and he and I fastened down a CD-ROM drive in my radio computer. Then he got to fasten the case panel by screwing in the thumbscrews that hold it on. I know it's very simple but he gets to feel like he's helping Grandpa and being a super tool user guy. Then he ran around the house for a while with a couple of little LED flashlights I bought when I got his tool set. He attached them to his head and told me he was a car.

The network is up and running. There's one more step before everything is finished, perhaps two, but the software configuration is essentially complete other than minor tweaks as I find things that I either forgot to implement or didn't know I needed to. Now I just have to wait for a couple of Ethernet extension cables I ordered to come in so I can move the firewall/router out closer to the middle of the room for easier access through the house. I may have to get an amplified antenna. I don't really want to spend any more money if I don't have to, but my daughter says she's having trouble maintaining a signal in the basement, and if repositioning the antenna doesn't work I may have to.

Actually there is one more thing I have to do. In some ways the point of this exercise was to allow a wireless connection to a computer in the front room that serves two purposes. One is as a web-enabled machine for homework and the like; unfortunately it too is getting a bit old and slow for modern browsers and word processors, so I may have to do some research into lighter-weight alternatives. The second is for that machine to allow the TiVo to make its daily calls that update the program listings. Currently we have to string a big orange cable down the hall to the bedroom and over to the Ethernet switch, more or less diagonally across the house. This way the TiVo will connect to the front room computer, which will connect to the firewall, which will connect to the Internet, which will connect to the TiVo servers out on the net somewhere. Hey, better that than stringing a big orange cable all over the house.

Come to think of it there's probably no reason why I couldn't put a second wireless card into the front room computer and let people connect to it. Or maybe I can do it with just the one. I'll have to go investigate.

About 45 years ago one of my jobs around the house was to get up and adjust the rabbit ears on top of the TV if the reception started getting fuzzy on one of the three or four channels we got. Now I get irritated if I have to hook up a wire once a week so I can get a list of what's on on the 100+ channels that come streaming into my house. Once again, living in the future rules.

Yesterday was quite a day and I feel like I actually accomplished something.

The Tooth Of The Matter

Sunday I was sitting in church waiting for services to start and Igor the Younger offered to share a couple of Mike&Ikes his grandma had given him. I took one, thanked him, praised him for sharing, bit down on it and immediately wished I hadn't. Bit down, not praise Igor the Younger. The candy knocked a crown loose off of one of my lower right molars. Luckily my dentist, who is a family friend and attends the same church, was sitting right behind us, took a look and arranged for me to come in yesterday. The bottom line is that he feels like I need a couple of posts in what remains of the molar to get the crown to stay on, but he cemented it on so it would stay in until he could bring me in for the full procedure. I'm grateful that he was able to take care of it quickly. I wasn't in pain - the tooth was root canaled long ago - but my tongue kept scraping against the sharp edge of the remnants of the tooth. It's healing up now but will probably still be a couple of days before the abrasions and lacerations go away.

Shopping For Tools

My daughter very kindly picked me up from the dentist with Igor the Younger in tow, and we stopped off at Walgreen's on the way home to pick up some Spider-Man Band-Aids to take care of some boo-boo or another he had gotten himself into. It was a fun experience as only shopping at Walgreen's with a four-year-old can be. We never got past the toy aisle, where he tried to use his Con Auntie And Grandpa skill. Luckily we both made our Resist Con Job From Four Year Old Who Wants You To Buy A Bag Of Water Balloons roll. We didn't get water balloons (although if the temperature stays up we might just have to), but on the way to the checkout I spotted a little $5 household tool kit with some jewelers' screwdrivers and a couple of other useful gadgets. The water balloons would have been cheaper, but Igor the Younger's is fascinated by tools and this looked like it would be a good addition to his collection. It wasn't until I got to the checkstand that I figured out that this toolkit had both a pair of scissors and a wire snipper, both of which can be very dangerous in a little boy's hands. Especially this little boy By then it was too late, though. He had already seen it and decided it was his. So we went home and he and his scissors helped me open a box that arrived in the mail, cut up some stray pieces of recycling and generally had a good time with the new toy.

Wireless Access Coming Soon!

Several years ago I bought a combination wireless access point and ethernet hub so I could share out our cable modem connection. It turned out to be not exactly what I wanted. Apparently Linksys makes several different kinds of WRT-54g WAP, and the one I bought wasn't the one that runs Linux natively and can be modified and improved. Even so, I put it to work, but it's showing its age and has some frustrating limitations, the lack of modability being one of them. Flakiness is another. Every so often it seems to drop connections or lose power or something, and I have to reset it.

I've wanted to replace it for a long time, but I wanted a specific replacement. I have an HP Vectra computer that's been around long enough to have a "Made For Windows 2000" sticker prominently displayed on the front. It's old and slow and would collapse under the weight of the software if you tried to put any modern GUI-based operating system on it (Linux included), but it's plenty fast enough for my mad scientific purposes.

The Linksys does have one thing going for it, though. It's a purpose-built machine that you can just plug in and go. There's a little configuration involved if you want to do anything fancy on your side of the network (meaning I did some configuration) but not much. Turning the Vectra in to a firewall/router/WAP/DHCP/DNS machine is a do-it-yourself project that involves scouring the Internet, discarding the stuff that was applicable to versions of Linux from six years ago that now would be known as The Hard Way, and making it all work and play nicely together.

I installed the latest version of Ubuntu Server onto the machine over the weekend (an adventure in paleocybernetics I won't bore you with here), gathered the software I needed and started configuring. Some of it was "by the book," er, website, some of it was trial-and-error-and-read-the-logs-and-try-again. Executive summary: Yesterday I turned on the access point package and got my cell phone to connect to the WAP and get an address. This means most of the configuration is done and everything is working the way it should for the packages installed so far. There's still some tweaking to be done, mostly involving security and making the Internet accessible to the machines behind the firewall, but the bulk of it – something I've wanted to do for over a year now – is done. I still have one piece of hardware on order before I can hook everything up, and my plan is to switch out the Linux machine for the Linksys router over the weekend, possibly after everyone has gone to bed Friday night. They'll all want their Internet access on Saturday, and I can't blame them. I would.

And Whaddaya Get? Another Day Older

After I finished up with the WAP, we ate supper and the grandkids settled in to watch a movie with Auntie. I was in the bedroom winding down and getting ready to go to bed, and as I often do I had the banjo in my lap as I did my computer stuff. I was just kind of idly picking at the strings, sounding an open chord, not playing anything in particular, when I hit upon the pattern 5-1-2-3-4. Hmmm. That sounds almost familiar. I tuned the second string down a half step to a B♭, did the pattern again, and yep, it was the opening riff to Tennessee Ernie Ford's version of "Sixteen Tons."

So of course I had to work out the song, which involved figuring out the chords on a banjo that's not tuned the way I usually play it. Luckily the way I remember the song it's only three chords. Rise Up Singing says four, but I usually go with what I hear when I can figure out what it is. Makes it sound "folkier," in my humble opinion. Anyway the base G minor chord was now an open strum and the other two just involved moving the finger fretting the second string up a fret.

There was something missing, though. I mean, I followed Ford's version pretty closely, but as it sometimes does, my ear was telling me to do something different. So just before the last verse ("If you see me comin'") I shifted the key up from G minor to A♭ minor by barring the first fret. That's something I don't often do on a banjo because the fifth string becomes discordant (G against an A♭ chord), but as it turns out I was able to solve that fairly easily. I had been ending each verse by doing a quick attack with a D7 chord on "owe" and then doing "my soul to the company store" a capella, following it up with the "5-1-2-3" riff. Since I have "railroad spikes" on my banjo (a capoing system where you put actual model railroad spikes into the fretboard and capo the fifth string by slipping the string under the spike) I figured out I could hit the chord for "owe", then while singing "my soul to the company store" quickly spike the fifth string at the sixth fret so it would sound an A♭ and be in accord with the new key. Then I did the riff, played a couple of Gm chords, and moved up to A♭m. I think it sounds pretty good.

Anyway that was my day yesterday. Hope you had a good one too.

* Within the hour of my contact with PY3ED, Edenir in Porto Alegre, Brazil, I got a confirmation, so now I have ten "countries" confirmed. Yay! (OK, so technically they're "entities," because let's face it, two of those "countries" are Alaska and Hawaii, but you say potato and I say solanum tuberosum.) At 6960 miles, give or take, it's not quite the most distant station I've worked this year. New Zealand and Australia beat it out. But I'm still happy to have worked him and the other Brazilian station from yesterday.

* The reverse beacon showed that my signal was getting out all over the place last night, including Japan and South Africa. I tried calling the South African station on the off chance that he was in his shack and watching the software when I called him instead of whatever South Africans do in the morning, but no such luck. Someday . . . someday.

* Or . . . maybe? After I tried calling him I went back to calling CQ before I went to bed, and after about the third try I saw a very faint signal on the waterfall. I could tell it was there but the software wasn't decoding it. At one point instead of CQ I sent QRZ? ("Who is calling me?") in the hope that he would keep trying and conditions would improve, but they never did before I had to switch over to monitoring and go to sleep. When that happens I occasionally tell myself it's some rare DX trying to get in touch with me, but it's much more likely to be a station in the gray area where their signal has gone up into the ionosphere but not come back down yet. Rare DX from Boise or Medford. :-)

* I am waiting to hear back from a recruiter on a job I interviewed for on Thursday. This would be a good job, but it would mean I'd have to commute to the Eastside again. The things we have to put up with to do mundane stuff like pay the rent.

* Igor the Younger banged into my banjo the other day. He knocked the bridge flat, broke the first string and knocked the tailpiece a bit out of line. I wasn't happy about this, but I'm glad he didn't put a hole through the head. I'd been thinking I can't remember the last time I changed strings, so it was time to do that anyway. Now I'll probably just take all the strings off, clean everything that looks like it can be cleaned, realign the tailpiece and put on new strings. If I do that it probably won't take much to get it into shape for my Interfilk gig at Conchord when that gets ready to roll around.

When I inspected the damage I found a crack in the bridge, so I'll also need to order a new bridge. I use a compensating bridge these days and the local music store doesn't carry them. Dusty Strings might, but I never make it to that part of town anymore. Honestly it's easier to order one over the net.

The Igors are spending time with Mom and Dad this weekend so no playing fish or facilitating Officer Igor. Which is fun and all, but there's a bunch of stuff coming up the littles wouldn't be interested in.

* Folklife!

OK, the littles would love some parts of the Northwest Folklife Festival, and I hope their parents take them, but I for one don't envy anyone trying to chase Igor the Younger around a cheek-to-jowl Seattle Center. He's just too big and too fast and could be in the wading pool next to Key Arena before you can say "Bob's-yer-uncle."

Some of the things I like about Folklife:

. The price is right. It's free (funded by donations actually).

. Picking a spot and just watching "the free show" as my dad used to say. Just seeing the amazing variety of people going by.

. Listening to the buskers performing along the walkways and under the trees.

. Wandering around through the vendor displays. All kinds of food and lots of cool items I can't afford. I really miss the Musical Instrument Showcase; they used to have an entire room dedicated to selling instruments topped off by an auction, but the auction closed down several years ago and the Showcase wasn't far behind. I bought a didgeridoo and a Pyrex flute at the Showcase in years when I was a bit more flush; I still have both of them.

. Plopping down in a performance venue without knowing what's going to come up. You could get old novelty tunes from the 20s and 30s on fiddle and uke, followed by a bandura concert and then by a traditional Thai dancer. We've seen gamelans and zydeco, storytellers and Irish bands.

This year we have a destination in mind rather than completely surrendering ourselves to serendipity. Miss Thing, our 15-year-old choir student, has an assignment to go to a choral concert and write a report by the end of the school year. Folklife is showcasing the Seattle Women's Choir, the Seattle Men's Choir, and the Seattle Girls' Choir on Sunday. I think that should qualify.

* Radio!

The bands have been a bit more active lately. I'm still not hearing anyone outside North America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand on HF, but that doesn't mean I should quite looking. I still need to get the antenna up in the air.

* Contest!

Ham radio contests are interesting critters. The idea is to make contacts with as many participants as possible during the span of the contest. Some contests are limited in scope (hams in Michigan, for instance, or veterans), and the idea is to contact members of that scope for contest credit, or if you're a member of the scope, make as many contacts with anyone participating as you can. Some are open to everyone who wants to participate, and everyone contacts everyone else. There are byzantine rules about how to calculate your score, but the basic idea is, work as many stations as you can. Contacts tend to go pretty quickly.

This weekend will be the CQ Worldwide WPX Contest, CW (Morse code) version, sponsored by CQ Magazine. It's a free-for-all where your score is in part based on the number of different prefixes you work during the contest. In this context the "prefix" is the part of a radio ham's call that precedes the block of identifying letters. It generally has both alpha and numeric characters and ends in a number. So for my call, WA7KPK, the prefix is "WA7". It's not as common a prefix as it used to be, but it's by no means rare. Then there are calls like 4U1ITU, the ham radio station at the headquarters of the International Telecommunications Union, the UN body charged with international radio regulations. Their prefix, 4U1, is literally unique. There's only one station with that prefix.

CQ Magazine sponsors an award called the WPX, which you can earn by getting verified contacts with ham stations with 300 different prefixes. It is probably possible to work enough stations for the WPX during a contest weekend. Certainly if you're attacking the contest seriously, you can do it if you can get the contacts verified. It's been many years since I did any heavy-duty contesting, and I don't know how involved I'll get with this contest. I may just hang around, give some participants a new multiplier, and not take it too seriously. The contest starts at 5 tonight and runs for 48 hours; there's no way I'll spend that much time at it (especially since you're required to take some time off during the contest). Or I may see how close I can get to that magic 300. I have over 50 now in about two months of operation, so who knows?

* General hamming!

Just getting on, doing some casual and digital operation. One of the interesting things about contests is that a big free-for-all like WPX can crowd the bands, leaving hams who don't want to participate grumbling about "those *%!@(& contesters". Some years ago three new bands were added to the ham radio spectrum; part of the deal for allocating those bands to us hams was that contest activity would not be allowed on them. I may meet up with some refugees from some of the more crowded bands on these so-called WARC bands if I decide the contest has crowded everyone else out. That, and my normal nets on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

* Work!

Yes, the curse of the working class. I'm a contractor and need the money and don't get paid time off on this contract, so hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work I go. I have a couple of jobs I can do while everyone else is off enjoying the weekend.

Here's hoping you enjoy your weekend and get to do something fun.

When you are four years old you come up with imaginative games based on your observation of the world around you. On a recent long car trip Igor the Younger designated my wife as an owl who was supposed to say "Hoo hoo" and my daughter as a rooster who would say "Cock-a-doodle-doo." When the owl hooted he would "go to sleep" (lay his head back and loudly snore) and when the rooster crowed he would jump up and say "Huh? What?"

Igor the Younger has noticed that police officers carry radios much like Grandpa's (a little VHF handheld I use to access the local repeaters) and they wear their microphones on their uniform shirt up near their ears. I call those their epaulets but I don't know if that's the proper word for them.

At any rate he will come in and ask, "Grandpa, can I play Officer Igor?" I, being an accommodating mad scientist, want to facilitate his play time and stir his imagination, so I take my handheld, clip it to his belt, clip the microphone to his collar (because his shirt doesn't have anything that looks like a epaulet) and send him off to serve and protect.

At first I was a bit worried that he would key the microphone and cause me some problems, because unlicensed operators are frowned upon in the ham ranks, even if they're four-year-old policemen. Then I came up with an ingenious plan to keep everyone involved out of trouble. The handheld has a number of non-ham channels programmed into it, including three local National Weather Service channels. I just set the handheld to one of the weather channels and we pretend it's the dispatcher. He's happy, I'm happy, and about the worst that can happen is he runs the battery down. I know how to recharge it.

Ah, but couldn't he change the channel and end up on an unauthorized frequency? There's a two-button combination that locks the keypad so he stays on the weather broadcast, and even if he were to somehow unlock the keypad, the weather broadcast is surrounded by a couple of other weather broadcasts.

So now I feel safe knowing that Officer Igor is on the watch.

It appears that igor, my file and print server, is well and truly dead. After about seven years of service I finally pulled the plug on it last night. It was not only not booting from any hard drive I tried in it, it may have been actively clobbering the hard drives and/or USB drives I was booting it from. My time is worth enough, and computer hardware is cheap enough, that I can't justify putting any more time into trying to figure out what's going on.

Now it's time to play musical computers:

* My laptop will become my primary development/ham radio machine. As I type this on the laptop I am doing some maintenance on the hard drive, after which I'll be installing my ham radio programs. One bit of lemonade in this saga of lemons is that I have igor's monitor hooked up to the laptop, giving me a dual screen display. This will let me run propagation software, DX spotting sites and the like in the background while I do primary tasks in the front.

* My daughter has a computer she inherited from her brother that she isn't using. The plan is to put a new hard drive into it and install Windows 7 for my wife, whose computer is at least as old as igor, is still running Windows XP and hasn't had a registry cleaning in all that time.

Yeah. So, finally she will have a computer that will run her Gaia games at a reasonable pace. This is her Mother's day present from the two of us.

* My wife's old computer will, hopefully, become the new igor. It's of the same vintage as igor – in fact it uses the same motherboard – so I don't know how much longer it has left to run or whether it too will start acting berserk, but at least with any luck I'll be able to pull the files off the RAID arrays and onto an external drive.

And that's my Saturday. That, and figuring out why the cable was out at our house (answer: it wasn't, someone had just switched channels). And taking a nap. A nap is definitely on the agenda. And watching Classic Arts Showcase, which I highly recommend. I just learned that there's such a thing as a "Liverpool Oratorio" that Paul McCartney had a hand in. Presumably it's that Liverpool and that Paul McCartney. (I just checked. It is, and it is.)

There was one lucky winner in this weekend's $200 million Hollywood lottery.

And yes, I bought a ticket.

The Avengers shows why nobody does ensemble better than Joss Whedon. Ask yourself one simple question: Who is the star of The Avengers? Iron Man? Captain America? Thor? The Hulk? Black Widow? Nick Fury? Loki? They all get significant screen time, and they all get good lines and good business.

I'm not going to quote any of the lines from the movie for fear of generating spoilers for the three or four of you who haven't seen it yet. I will, however, give you the best Avengers line that wasn't in the movie.

On Friday my granddaughter went to school the morning after the midnight premiere. Several of her friends had gone to the movie, and it was all the buzz. One of the girls asked their social studies teacher if he'd gone to see it.

He drew himself up. "I would never sacrifice you children's education to go to a midnight showing of a movie."

Pause.

"And it was awesome.

Just sayin'."

Last week I got 200 feet of hookup wire from a supplier on eBay. I wasn't sure at the time what I would do with it, other than put it to work pushing radio waves. So I did some thinking and some planning, and about two hours ago I took the wire outside and started making a loop out of it along the back yard fence. The back yard fence is only about 8' tall, and taller is always better, so I wasn't sure what results I would get, if any, but I figured I'd give it a try.

I got the loop hung, ran the lead-in wires into the shack, and hooked everything up. Now it was time to test. The first test is, can I hear anything? I tuned to the 20 meter band and heard one of the "regulars" there calling CW. So far so good.

Second test, can I tune up the loop? That worked fine too. Now it was time to test.

20 meters was pretty quiet, so I went up to 17 meters, an underused band that hams have only had access to for about 30 years, to see what would happen. On the frequency the radio was tuned to, I heard something interesting going on, so I stopped to listen.

Time for a brief historical diversion.

April 2012 marks the 95th anniversay of the Battle of Arras, a major offensive during World War I near the town of Arras in northern France. Radio clubs often have special station setups and callsigns for big events like World's Fairs and Olympics. There were several special event stations to commemorate the sinking of the Titanic during April; I heard one but wasn't able to work him.

Up until today I had only ever heard about three or four special event stations and had only worked one, and that one was for Mt. St. Helens. The station I was hearing was using the call sign TM95BA. "TM" means the station is from "continental France," presumably as opposed to overseas possessions like St. Pierre et Miquelon. "95" represents the 95th anniversary, and "BA" for "Battle of Arris". Presumably the initials are the same in French.

TM95BA was coming in reasonably clearly and was firing off signal reports in rapid success. If there's one activity that makes JT65 seem leisurely by comparison, it's a rare station making his way through a gaggle of stations trying to contact him (this is called "working a pileup"). He wasn't swamped as far as I can tell, but he was going at the rate of about 3 contacts every 2 minutes, mostly to North American stations with a few Europeans in the mix.

I moved off frequency, made sure the new loop would tune up, boosted my power a little and moved back onto his frequency. Proper etiquette is to wait until a station finishes a contact before calling them, so I dutifully waited for him to signal QRZ? (which is used as an invitation to call) or 73 ("Best regards" - traditional ham signoff) or something similar before I called.

I started calling about 4:45 in the afternoon and he kept coming back to other stations. I don't blame him; they were probably swamping me and my Morse code is pretty rusty. Finally, at 5:03, he sent out a WA7 call. It sounded like what someone might think I sent, but I couldn't be sure. Was he calling me back? I didn't answer, but waited to see what he would do.

WA7? WA7 PSE K. "WA7 station, please go ahead." I slowed way down, both to send better Morse and to make sure he got my call right. If he misheard my call, I would get no credit for the contact.

WA7KPK 599 TU. "Your signal is excellent, thank you." In pileups and contests we hams always lie about our signal strength. It's always the best it could be, even if you have to dig the signal out of the noise. It's faster that way. The DX station knows he's getting out, and the other station just wants the contact. He can get a signal report from ordinary, non-rare stations.

TU 5NN E E. "Thank you. Let's stipulate that you have a perfect signal. Dit dit." The "dit dit" is the end of "shave and a haircut" and often tacked on to a final transmission to mean "I'm done." This is a very minimal contact. He already had my callsign, and I wanted to finish the contact quickly so he could move on to other stations. That's also proper etiquette.

E E QRZ? "Dit dit. Next??"

I had worked Europe! First time in over 30 years. I have to stress that France is by no means considered a rare station, but I managed to get the attention of a station that a lot of hams were looking for. It's always a very happy feeling. And there might be a nice commemorative QSL card in it for me.

I think I can safely say the loop works. Now for the big test. Does it work on the lower bands where I want to be able to check into some of the local nets? That's the real purpose of the project; anything else is gravy.

Now that I've proved the radio works I think I'll go chase Igor the Younger around for a while. Time for more contacts later.