Episode 18 — 73 and QRT for now

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After eight months, this is the final episode of the Zone Zero podcast.

It’s the last day of 2017, and we’ve had a pretty good contest season this year, considering how poor the radio conditions have been down in the bottom of Solar Cycle 24. We have another couple of years of these slack bands before things will perk up – and I would expect Solar Cycle 25 to be a lot better than we have experienced over the past decade or so.

If you look at historical records of previous sunspot cycles, it appears Cycle 24 was an anomalous one – with an unusually low peak sunspot count. Let’s hope it was just a one-off, and that by 2019 or 2020 the rise toward the next sunspot peak will be a lot stronger than it was last time around.

Here on the final weekend of 2017, we had two important contests to close out the year.

Participation was pretty good in the Radio Amateurs of Canada RAC Winter contest which began on Friday afternoon and ran through Saturday. I had a really good time making more than 600 contacts with so many friends across Canada and the United States. Multipliers in this contest are the Canadian provinces and territories, and over the course of the 24 hours I managed to make contact with all except Nunavut and Northwest Territories.

The other major contest this weekend was the Stew Perry Top Band Distance Challenge. During the solar minimum years we’re now enduring, we would expect the lower bands to be quite good.  160M was very good for me over the weekend with noise levels very low, though I have to admit signal levels were also low — but at least they were standing out against the background.

This was the first time I’ve used an amplifier in the Stew Perry, and while I expected to see a dramatically improved score, my score was actually only the sixth best in all years I’ve operated in this contest.

That is a great reminder that watts in the coax don’t mean much if they don’t get out.

With 700W this time, I earned fewer points than I’ve earned in five previous years running just 100W. The difference? My 160M antenna used to be a lot better, but over the past few years the horizontal portion of that Inverted-L has sagged, and the elevated radial wires I use have been pulled down from their elevated positions. And I’ve been too lazy for the past three summers to get out there and fix things.

That will change this summer – Santa brought me a drone, which I’ll be able to use to put new lines over the very tall Ponderosa pine trees on our property, so the Inverted-L can get back in top form for Top Band.

Which is probably a good transition point to talk about my eyes. You have to see well to work on antennas, and certainly for flying a drone over tall trees. Right now, I’d be lucky to be able to read the flying instructions, let alone actually flying a drone.

I have really enjoyed putting together these occasional reports, many of them following important contests on the annual calendar. What you may not have known is that I’m fighting a serious eye condition which means that I am gradually – and, in recent months, more rapidly — losing my vision.

So far I’m struggling to read emails and web pages, but I can still see well enough to drive. At some point in the next few weeks I will be unable to read or drive – and at that point I will be unable to go to work or do anything at work even if I did get to the office. Of course, that also means producing a podcast even occasionally will no longer be an option.

The underlying condition was a retinal failure two years ago – and while treatment for that has brought my retinas back to almost full health, the drugs that cured my retinas involved steroid implants that are known to cause rapidly developing cataracts in my lenses. Sure enough, a year after the steroids began, the cataracts began forming this summer.

So, since August I have gone from 20/20 vision to barely being able to read an e-mail message, and the cataracts are getting worse by the day. The side effect of the eye condition is that I will no longer be able to play in the contests, and that’s going to be quite difficult for someone like me who loves to contest and really enjoys the camaraderie of our contesting community.

So, I needed to prepare this final episode of Zone Zero while I still can. Let me tell you, putting this one together has been a hundred times more difficult than it was even just a couple of months ago. Things have deteriorated that quickly.

The great news is my eyes are going to come back!

Through the wonders of modern science, new multifocal lenses will fully restore my vision back to how it was when I was 20 years old. In fact, my vision will be better than when I was 20, because I will no longer need glasses for anything — from reading to seeing the far horizon.

For now, I will suspend the Blubrry podcast hosting service I have been using. Instead, the full archive of Zone Zero episodes will be available on the website at ZONE.VA7ST.CA. If new episodes resume in the future, they’ll simply be posted to that website but won’t be provided as a podcast feed.

I’m too young to be held back by cataracts and I am looking forward to being productive and active again as soon as possible.

You may hear me in the ARRL RTTY Roundup next weekend, and perhaps other activities in January, but if you don’t hear VA7ST you’ll know why.

73 and thanks for listening.

Now, let’s go get ‘em. I’ll see you out there. Sometime soon.