I’m too late to wish you a Happy Halloween. But I always set my clocks back the day before we change back to standard time. I already have that done. I just have to be sure to account for that as I look at my clocks today. The computer clocks and my atomic clocks will take care of themselves.
I’ve been planning for some time to get into doing some antique radio restoration work. I finally got that started in October. A friend of mine gave my girlfriend Bonnie a Clarion 146-series AM radio. The outside is in very good shape, and it is her favorite color, red. It will need a bunch of parts replaced before I can give it a try. But the major complex components seem to be OK. I will have pictures and video if I’m successful.
Another activity for me in October was selling a lot of stuff on eBay. I got rid of my D-Star handheld (which I was not using) and a bunch of license plates that were surplus to my collection. Also sold some electronic stuff that I wasn’t using.
The ham bands continue to be in excellent shape, and I have worked a bunch of new countries and states that I need. Uploading my October logs to Logbook of The World produced a number of new confirmations needed for the awards I am working on.
On the lower frequencies (AM broadcast band) I logged eight new stations as the result of a simple two-minute recording I made with my Perseus software defined radio (SDR). I recorded from 700-1500 KHz. With a recording, you can playback stretches as many times as needed to try to discern what you’re hearing. Plus, with Perseus recordings you can change to single sideband mode, and adjust the receive bandwidth at will. It took me several hours to get through that one recording, and I have several more to do. Friday nights during the autumn are popular times for AM DXers to listen, as a lot of stations are broadcasting high school football games. Some of these may stay on the air longer than normal, or run daytime power levels longer than normal.
With stormy weather expected on Halloween, trick-or-treating was moved to Friday night here. The weather was excellent, but I only had 14 kids. That compares to 30+ in the recent past. That is a lot of leftover candy I am going to have to work through. Tough job, but somebody has to do it!