Ya gotta wonder, sometimes

I'm banging away on FT8 10 m this morning and I see a CQ SOTA coming from an N3 call. It usually takes a second for my system to resolve new calls as they come up. And this one resolved to Erie Pennsylvania.

Well, you can imagine the look on my face wondering how in the heck he managed to get up a mountain in the weather they've got down there, today, as evidenced by this pic I've included that was taken at Erie this morning.

Turns out he was out in California, as revealed by the SOTA website. That made a lot more sense on two levels. The band would have to be running awfully short to get 12 DB over the noise level from Erie from rochster, and Erie is up to their pips in snow and the West Coast was coming in pretty strong anyway.

But man....
it had me going for a minute.

The hole in the pattern

 What you see above, is where my signals have been heard, in the last 24 hours.
Not too bad. A litle disappointing, though, that there's such a large hole over China and India, etc.
More power, apprently, won'

t t solve the problem, because I'm not hearing any operators from these areas, despite there beinga  fair number of Ham operators in that area, particularly in India. Oh, well. You do what you can.

My FT* operations

I'll give you a quickie overview of my FT*  operations, in response to several questions on the topic.

My big shack computer is being rebuilt, so at the moment, I'm running a mini-PC, running Windows 10 with 2 screens.  This is the PC I have connected to my Yaesu FT991a.  Understand that the graphic below is actually a capture of both screens at once. This is the normal digital config I've been running for quite a while now. It's been quite effective for me.

On the far left, is the main screen for WSJT-X. To it's immediate right is  WIN4YEASU, which controls the radio itself via CAT.  It also makes available com port repeaters, so as to allow both WIN4YAESU and several other packages to run simultaneously.  As you can see, all the controls normally hidden on the 991's main screen are right up front on WIN4YAESU.... which is why I speak so highly of it.

Immediately below that, is the waterfall from WSJT-X.  That should be self explanatory to anyone who has run FT*.

Then we move to the right hand screen.

The biggest window is GridTracker's main screen.  This keeps updating with what the system is hearing and where you're being heard in real time.

Upper right is the current roster of active stations that you've not contacted yet.  The system uses a local copy of my QRZ logs to determine what is on that list,
 

 Below that is the station I'm currently working.

My bigger computer, once it's rebuild process is completed, will maintain 4 screens in pretty much the same basic config.
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