On Saturday, sale I sat out on the task of getting my office cleaned up, and my new rigrunner kit installed.  That may sound like a small task, but it involved rearranging some furniture in my home office to be sure that there was enough space to move around.

A quick trip to Harbor Freight allowed me to pick up a new ratchet crimper.  My hope is to use this for the PowerPole connections.  I was too cheap to drop $50 on the Powerwerx  brand, so I’m hopeful that these will do the trick.

However, when I went to hook up the RigRunner kit to my 25 amp power supply from Radio Shack, I found that the 12 gauge wire wasn’t able to connect to the terminals in the back.  I had the choice to remove the terminals, strip the wire, and run the bare wire into the power supply.  However, because electricity scares me – I did not.  I will look and see if I can find another solution.

I did check into the 146.88 ALERT Sunday Night Net, on my Baofeng HT.  That’s the first time that I’ve done that in a few years.  I was told that my volume was a little low, and had to repeat my check-in.  I may have just been speaking quietly into the HT.  But my second transmission, on 5W, went without a problem.

I had also planned to check into the 146.580 simplex net.  However, I have not done any simplex work before.  I noticed that I was only hearing part of the traffic between net control and the stations checking in.  I have learned since then that only hearing 1 side of a conversation on simplex is common.  So I did not attempt to check in.