I’m currently working toward something something which I don’t normally do: an achievement award. For about two months, I’ve been trying to log contacts via the JT65 mode on ham radio, with the eventual goal of making contacts in every state. It’s not a particularly difficult award: I suspect that it will mostly require patience to get the remaining states, but it’s been kind of fun, and has made me pay attention to propagation, and make at least a minor improvement to my antenna setup. As of today, I have 33 confirmed states, with unconfirmed contacts in several others. The states I have remaining are:

Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

It’s amazing that I’ve managed to somehow avoid Nevada and Oregon: you’d think they would be easy, but for whatever reason, my signals seem to skip right over them. And of course, some states are hard to get just because of the low ham population. I’ll be stalking NT5HS a bit, which is a club station listed in Texas, but in fact operates remotely from a station in South Dakota. I’ve tried a couple of Maine stations before, but had difficulty reaching them.

Anyway, I’m having fun. If any of my readers lives in one of my “to do” states above, try looking for me on 20m (with occasional diversions to 15m and 40m) and see if I can’t put you in the logbook.