Thursday, 7th March, 2024

Today I got up, took the kids to school, drove to a summit (not a mountain, a hill of 539m/1700 ft), walked up it, played radio for nearly an hour. Spoke to 37 people in 14 countries up to 1500 miles away. I came home, had a lovely cup of tea, and wrote up a blog post about it. Then normal life resumed.

It was great. Really fun making contacts on the mountain with 5.5m of wire getting blown around whilst I crouched behind an outcrop to shelter from the howling gale. I was back home by 1:30pm and felt like I’d had a whole day already. Plus my legs feel like they did something.

I wanted to sort out my logs on the computer and then write a blog post, and that computer time went by super fast. Definitely unwise for me to start the day on the computer. If I do do this part time thing then I think it should be radio construction/hikes/etc. first, then fiddle about on the computer until school pick up.

Had a really long chat with a lady in my team at work who also works part time, about pay and work and life. Felt like a rare occurrence but a good conversation. We both want to be paid fairly but not ambitious to chase after pay rises. However, I feel like the only way to get paid “fairly” is to chase after pay rises.

The only thing with the radio hobby (and me being me), is that it’s quite expensive. I tell myself that once I buy all these things then “I’ll be done”, but we all know that’s not how it works. I’m only “done” when I cool off on a hobby and am focused on something else. I’ve had my X-E4 for a while now and not interested in getting a new camera (briefly with the X1006 but that’s not even available to buy). Hopefully building various antenna is maybe how I can do things but not spend too much.

Ordered the internal tuner mod for the KX2 from the states. That’s another $250 🙄 but then I’ll be done! Well except I sort of want the telescopic antenna it has for taking with me when I don’t/can’t use a wire antenna.