December already?

It's hard to believe it's December already.

Yesterday we had a birthday party for Alexandra -- she turns three on Tuesday. The party was nice and today both she and Amanda ran around half the day wearing some princess costumes she got. My little girls are playing dress up already. Oy.

Friday night I tried getting on the MARC 'net with my new FT-7800R but they had problems hearing me. It looks like I had the radio misprogrammed to talk to the repeaters, and I was transmitting on the output freq. I'm still learning both the radio and the programming software. I reprogrammed the radio tonight and hopefully I'll have better luck.

I did figure out a new, hopefully decent, antenna setup. Since my office is located on one of the front corners of the house next to the driveway, I cracked the window and placed my magnet-mount mobile antenna on the roof of Judith's car, then ran the coax inside. This gets the antenna away from nearby objects which can detune it, and gives it a proper RF ground. We'll see in a little while how it works.