30 December 2024 am edition

 After getting to bed around 1 am here, I was up at 6:30 am to get some breakfast before heading back out to play more radio. This morning I set up on the north side of the island at a little spot affectionately known as Pirate’s Cove. Technically there isn’t a geological formation that would imply there is a cove, just a great spot on the beach. Also I am not sure of any pirate activity, past or present, on Wake, but if I happen to find the buried treasure you will know if I suddenly put up a multi-stack Yagi antenna and start operating from an air conditioned shelter. In the meantime I will just continue to work through the pileups.

  Yesterday I heard from Andy, N4LAG, that he was going to be on a SOTA summit (W7A/MN-144, Lookout Mountain) while he was in Arizona. I have had several QSOs with Andy while participating in SOTA from Montana. We hatched a plan to try to meet for a brief CW contact on 10m. That worked great and provided a great kickoff to radio play from Wake.

  17m this morning wasn’t amazing. At first I was only working the US west coast, VK, ZL, and JA. The band began to open some but with some decent QSB. France, England stopped by to say hello, as well as some stations in the Caribbean and northern South America. I could sense the log was filling quickly as I was able to add calls 3 per minute pretty consistently. 2 hours and 15 minutes later I think I ran out of people to talk to. That was a first for me. 283 QSO in the book. In the Google Earth QSO plot photos below, yellow were from 2024-12-29 (0600-0930z), and red were from 2024-12-29 (2000-2215). Back at it again this evening… 73, AL