Gone Birding…
That’s a Northern Mockingbird. That is also a real photograph, not in any way AI enhanced. It is slightly edited with DarkTable and photographed on my newest camera, the superzoom Nikon P1100. I hear that birdwatching is all the rage now (who knew?)
This bird is really upset at AA1F and I. We have spent the morning stalking birds, photographing and recording them. He is flashing his wings at us, showing us what a tough guy he is. A regular ol’ Rocky Balboa of the bird world. Wanting us to get away from whatever he is guarding. It’s been a few months of birding now. You can see my entire (growing) collection of bird photos here at km1ndy.com/birding.
I have taken about 10,000 photographs this year. This is not hyperbole. I have a purpose. I have been taking pictures of cats at a local shelter in the hopes of helping them get adopted. And quite a few have found a new home over the past year. The early pages were shot with my old Nikon D3200 and I had no idea what I was doing. The later pages are with a Nikon D500, and I am starting to be able to hold my own. Taking pictures of critters, whether flying or crawling, is becoming my newest passion.
As you may have guessed, radio has been a bit on the backburner. I have had a setback, my beloved Yaesu FT-991A no longer displays a waterfall. It is sitting like a lump on my TV tray ham shack yet to be replaced because, well I want another one but I don’t want to break another one. And I am just not in the mood to spend $1500 dollars on a radio…again.
Cats, cameras, motorcycles, and birds have eaten into a lot of my free time this year. AA1F and I managed quite a few Moto-SOTA activations in July, and we are now a little over 100 points away from the SOTA Mountain Goat. I threw in a couple POTAs as well. Below is my radio station in a vacation house on North Carolina’s Outer Banks a couple of weeks ago. Note how I wrapped my end-fed half-wave around the sunroom. I made a single contact to prove it worked, though I did not try very hard for more.
I am not out of interest when it comes to radio as much as I am out of time. I have learned that if I can take a compelling picture of a cat, then that cat has a much better chance of being adopted. The more adoptions, the more cats we can help. One night a week, I take several hundred feline pictures and then spend evenings editing them. One popular adoption website shows over 1400 cats available within a 50 mile radius of my shelter. There are not 1400 adopters.
I guess this is a bit of a catch up post. I have been getting a little bit of “where have you been?” I am here! I swear! In fact, last month Georgia (my pup) and I had another girl’s camping trip complete with a POTA activation of Wompatuck State Park (Massachusetts US-2465).
I forgot a critical BNC to UHF adapter, and needed to rip out some coax from my van’s mobile set-up to make it work. Amazingly I had a cable terminated both with a male BNC and a PL-259 running under the rubber mat of my van! Otherwise I had no way of actually connecting my antenna (the Chameleon LEFS 4010) to the Icom 705 transceiver.
I activated QRP with both CW and FT8.
I used the Android phone app FT8TW and made quite a few digital contacts. It is essentially a plug-and-play set-up with the IC-705.
So I guess I have done a bit of radio this past summer after all. I did present at the HamXposition again this year as well. It wasn’t exactly a total radio washout despite the 3400 hundred miles I managed to put on my motorcycle since the spring. And the hundreds (thousands?) of cat pictures. And the dozens of bird species I have spotted (and can now recognize!)
I think the one recurring theme…there is just never ever enough time.
I thought about you.
KM1NDY
(Oh, my Mom did take exactly one picture lol of me activating Cape Hatteras. She was hiding in the van while I was sitting at a picnic table in the pitch black woods, believing I was about to get eaten by a werewolf. Boy the propagation was amazing from that location!!!)
