Update: I cleaned up the ‘shack’ and built a shelf for Dad’s funky butt radio gear… elsewhere in the basement. I’ll get to that Johnson Viking I, really I will. And I can sell the Ameco, or get to that one too…

But I geared up. I got an Icom 7300, retooled my long wire with a counterpoise (the garden fence, etc.), installed a Balun and some coax so that I won’t get RF burns sitting in my chair.

Ham Shack as of 7-8-2019

I’ve been working my way through a sort of checklist of things to do/try. Program some memories. Check. Fine tune my Arduino keyer. Check. Try listening to and decoding RTTY. Check. Explore other digital modes in FLDIGI. Check.

This afternoon, I tuned up 10 meters where I have voice privileges. It’s a big band, very empty, and my privileges only go to the 1st 3rd of the band. It tunes up, but not great. I get an SWR reading of 2.1:1 in the best case. This afternoon, there was a voice (or ‘phone’ as the hams like to say) CQ call going on, a repeated message in a sort of a southern hickish accent, that reduced the intelligibility of even the phonetics. The call was something like “kilo kari four whiskey tango zulu.” But ‘kari’ can’t be right. That’s not in the phonetic alphabet. So I responded with ‘whikey tango zulu, this is KD9 november delta juliet.’ I got no response and the automated CQ call continued on. I was at 50% power, so I cranked it up to 60. And repeated the call.

Now I got a response:
(Very southern accent, very high dudgeon)
“Say my whole callsign. You only gave a partial, that’s not right. Don’t do that!”
“I can’t make out your complete callsign, you’re signal is not clear.”
“My signal is not clear?”
“No. You are not clear.”

There was a pause of about a second, and then the recorded CQ call resumed.

It was my first, incomplete, QSO. To an asshole. But that’s ok, I had been warned.

Made contact on phone with another human being, an asshole. Check.