The majority of births are simple if you let them be and the midwives go to great lengths to make sure the conditions are right for a successful event. In the case of our third we hit some conditions leading up to the delivery date that disqualified us for a home birth so we seamlessly transitioned into the hospital system (where the midwife still delivered the baby)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45811003

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https://fmt.arrl.org/

Either way, a fun idea!

73 de Sean N3RTW

Contesting is when there's an event, usually over a weekend with a set of rules and a point system for contacts. People get on the air and try and get the most points by making contacts. Big contests might have 10 or 20 thousand people all over the world participating and top competitors are running 2 or 3 radios simultaneously to get rates of over 400 contacts an hour. But there's also smaller contests such as QSO parties where a State tries to get people from every county on the air and people from across the country try to work them. Or silly ones like the Zombie Shuffle at the end of this month where people make up funny names and exchange them at low power, low speed Morse code just for fun. https://www.contestcalendar.com/ shows all the contests and gives you some idea of the variety.

Since some of the less popular countries tend to get active during the big contests, many DX'ers will enter contests just to find a few more.

WSPR is all over the ham bands. There's people making relatively small, hydrogen filled balloons and trying to see how long they will stay alive. They're using WSPR on 20M to broadcast their telemetry (search for Traquito).

Contesting is also fun. There are a variety of modes. I got into RTTY contests lately. It's a bit of a thrill to work through a bunch of callers or to snag a rare multiplier.

I should also mention Parks on the Air. I like going to parks and within a few minutes have people calling me. Or to hunt for other people in parks. Almost like a contest and DXpedition rolled into one.

N3RTW

However, it is very nice looking and when I did have it up I did pay more attention to things like solar weather.

73 - N3RTW

You can be as connected to the past as you want in this hobby. It's at the point where we have people getting remote islands on the air by driving a boat onto shore that has a radio and an amplifier, raising an antenna, and then people can operate from either a boat anchored off shore or back home over Starlink. And they're doing it in Morse code, so you have this nice blend of the old and the new.

That said, everything you do in amateur radio is in the open. So if you want to talk to your European friend, only the Sun can prevent you, but anyone can listen.

Clubs like Long Island CW have thousands of members and run classes all day to teach people Morse and help with their operating skills. Just this morning I joined the weekly CWOps mini contest which is so popular they have it in 4 x 1 hour sessions. And that's on top of the 3 medium speed sessions on Mondays, and 2 slow speed ones.

There might not be as much ragchew activity but between contests, DXers, and POTA, there's CW activity all over the bands.

Got a nice pair of Github socks at re:invent for showing a pic of that last one at their booth!