I’ve been trying to straighten up the shack a little bit, but it’s a hard chore. There are too many distractions, and my mind seems to jump from one thing to the other. There are projects that I want to finish, projects that I’m putting off, and projects that just poke you in the eye. I have a very nice CN-801HP SWR and Power meter that I’ve had for some time now, and it does a great job sitting between that big old OCF dipole hanging 45 feet in the air and my monster sized Dentron Super Tuner. The LCD that illuminates the meter had gone out and while that didn’t hinder the operability of the meter, I’d lost that blue-white glow that helped warm the shack on radio nights.
More than once I tried to get up the nerve to open up the meter and simply replace the LCD, but I couldn’t cope with the idea of destroying the meter movement. I found an article in the Technical Correspondence section of the July 2011 issue of QST by Colin Haig, VE3MSC on the very same subject. The article gave me the courage to give it a try, knowing that if I failed it would be $HAM dollars down the drain. With guidance from Colin and a thin blade knife I was able to open the meter casing and replace the LCD. It’s a little thing, but it’s something that has been bothering me for some time. I’m glad to have it done, and now I can move on to the 1000 other little things in shack that bother me. Thanks, Colin.
Another project I’d been working on a little at a time was digitizing my QSL card collection. If you ask me why this is necessary, I couldn’t answer you other than to say I like having digital access to the images, and, well, I don’t know why else. I had been trying to do it with my flatbed scanner and Adobe Photoshop. It does a great job, but it’s a slow process and requires a lot of placing and removing cards. I saw an advertisement for a Pandigital Photo Scanner that was designed for 4X6 photographs. It wasn’t too expensive and besides, my wife has all those old pictures she’s wanted me to scan in for ages now, and that meant that it wasn’t strictly $HAM dollars I was spending. I found one on EBay that was even cheaper, so I ordered it.
I will admit to being an old analog guy, but I love this digital world. The day I hooked up my 300 baud modem to my old Commodore C64, I knew that someday, QSL cards would be digital. It makes too much sense not to happen. But I still send out some snail mail cards both here in the states and overseas, and if you send me a card with a SASE, you get a card back with your SASE inside. And I make a big production of it, too. I make my card as nice as I can, because I know the thrill at the other end, when that envelope addressed to A.R.S. 2X3 comes in the mail.
No comments:
Post a Comment