Signal Report

Portable Activity Day happens on the 1st January in New Zealand. This is a pretty popular day because it's summer break and the country offers many summits, lakes, and parks to activate. Also it's quite convenient that UTC time rolls over at 1pm our time. At the time of writing, my setup consists of an ex-military Fuchs B25 driving an EFHW antenna . These and accompanying parts are packed into a backpack for lugging around. It's not by any means an optimized kit for lightweight SOTA activity, but I choose to have a portable HF kit out of pragmatism: get away from the urban noise floor. For Portable Activity Day 2023 I operated from a beach. It was very enjoyable with many contacts made with other people around the country.

One time during my classes at university, the professor teaching our electronics project course said "if your circuit exhibits the behavior of a time variant system , then something is horribly wrong". This has been true for pretty much all of my experiences - a consistent circuit behavior which is independent of time. However one day, this was not the case, and it seemed I had a "time variant" circuit.   Needed it Yesterday. At the time of this time variant circuit, I was working for a startup company. As you can imagine, time is of the essence. I could release a board design on a Friday and have a built prototype ready for a smoke test by the following Friday. Digi-Key orders on a Friday morning would leverage time zones and weekend shipping. The PCB was made locally on a 2 day spin (I miss you CircuitLabs). When boards and components arrived, I'd pick-and-place the parts by hand with tweezers. Manual and expensive, but fast. Not much was required for tools. F...