Thanks to everybody that worked us today from K0M/SE-003. It was a cold, breezy, overcast day and the propagation was shaky, but we had fun with our five watts! My 9 year old daughter, Kylee, made most of the SSB contacts herself while I served as the control op and logged. Kylee really gets into it and we both appreciate all those that called her despite the fact the summit was a lowly 1 pointer and has been activated several times (initially by me on the opening day of the MinneSOTA association!).
I logged and sent CW barehanded and the cold had its effects: my penmanship and keying skills definitely showed it! I should have brought my gloves with removable liners!
The nice thing about SSB is that you can tell them your hands are numb, and you need them to slow down so you can etch their calls into your notebook HiHi. Fill the pause with an explanation of your grid location/transmitting position, and a synopsis of how extreme the weather is. That’s just what everyone sitting in the shack warm drinking their coffee wants to hear about, how much better they have it than you hihi.
Its always great to look at the logbook, and see how initially the script looks like a cross between cursive and print, then stage two looks like a pre-schoolers hand writing, and finally arrives at hieroglyphics, before reaching the final level of cuneiform script (Shortly thereafter, writing is abandoned alltogether, what is the point in writing what cannot be read?). I’ve tried it all - down mittens, USGI trigger finger mittens, ultra thin gloves, thin american football grippy gloves, barehanded…The only thing I could ever find that worked was a zippo handwarmer rubber banded to the back of my mitten clad microphone hand, and periodically switch out hands. Left hand starts with the mitten and the microphone, right hand runs pencil and radio, a few minutes later, switch off for left hand to write and run the radio, and the right hand to get the mitten microphone and handwarmer.
It doesn’t seem to matter much whether I write with my right or my left hand - at that point, the handwriting is so bad it’s chicken scratchings either way. I can’t imagine how hard that must make it to run CW when you can’t feel your hands. I can’t run CW in the shack with a cup of coffee, so doing it in 45mph winds and 8F air sounds pretty hardcore.
It’s really cool you are taking your daughter out to do outdoorsy things instead of buying a playstation and letting the kids have at it. Doubly cool that you have found an activity you both enjoy and can participate in together. It’s always good to learn something, and chances are she will pick it up and carry it forward into adulthood. Hope you guys had fun and stayed warm, and that you’re gearing up for the next summit!