0700 Sunday morning.

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They have been good to me over the years and I'm grateful.

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Part 2 of today's post has been written by the cat. I saw that one coming as I got up to pour more coffee.

Over the last week ham radio has been a slug fest trying to get new entities into my log. I just got Faroe Islands and QSL is going to be interesting as I had to go through a British QSL manager electronically. I just hope the Faroe Islander gets his log downloaded to the manager in a reasonable amount of time and didn't screw up my call sign.

I reworked Benin as the first time I sent for QSL I found out I was not in his log. I clearly recall him repeating my call sign to me, too.

The Benin rework was made possible by the Italian DXpedition team and they post their logs on line in real time. I'm in it for a QSO in 15 meters and I have sent for my card electronically. We'll see how long it takes.

I have to say that the Italian DXpedition team is an EXCELLENT bunch of operators unlike a lot of the individual hams that are a pain in the neck. If you have to deal with a lousy operator it is a pretty good chance it will be Italian. Japanese and Arabs have seemed to be the better operators out there.

When I am trying to get an Asian station and am calling 'CQ Asia' an Italian will often answer my call. When they do this I generally ask them if they know where they live. 

My guess is the Japanese hams are polite and patient by nature and the Arabs for the most part are very educated men but I digress.

My goal was to have 200 confirmed entities by the end of the year and it does not look like it is going to even come close. Once I hit about 170 or so things slowed right down to a trickle.

I suppose that's because I have gotten just about all of the entities that have any reasonable number of hams living there. 

An example of this is the Solomon Islands where activity is practically nil. Some entities are just plain uninhabited and are only  on the air when someone goes there for a DXpedition.

Anyway, I hope I can hit 200 eventually.

Today's post sucks but I have to get things done today.






To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY