Making Progress

As I've mentioned a few times in this blog, I'm working on building a ham "shack" in the backyard of my city lot.

We got the monolithic concrete foundation poured in mid-October and I've spent every weekend since then working on the construction. Right now I have the walls up and the roof on. This weekend I'm celebrating the end of the Division Election by taking Thursday and Friday off to get the doors and windows installed and the siding on. Then I will get the electric installed and have my inspection. Maybe I'll have a dipole up by the end of November!

I've missed out on ARRL CW Sweepstakes and I will be hammering nails instead of running the Phone Sweepstakes. I console myself by thinking maybe this time next year I will be snug in my shack proudly having achieved a full sweep in CW and preparing for the same on Phone.

People ask me how the election is going. Frankly, I don't know. My blog traffic is down to a bare trickle, two or three hits per day. The highest hit rate was at the beginning of October when the ballots were appearing in people's mailboxes. I suspect most people that were going to vote their ballot have already done so.

But! If you didn't get your's in yet you should hunt it up and get the thing into the mail today.

Some of the purpose of this Blog was to act as a dairy of my election experience. I hope to revisit the whole thing and write up a short article about how it went. So far I'm impressed with the process and how it is managed by the ARRL HQ. There are some things I think could use a little adjustment, like maybe providing an email mailing list of the ARRL members in the section or division to all of the candidates, or maybe even an official election area on the arrl.org website where candidates could have a little space to present themselves. As things are I think it is very hard to contact all of the ARRL members in a particular section or division without running contrary to the election rules or doing some spamming.

It has been enlightening for me to find out more about the services the ARRL provides. I had someone complain to me about the support system for affiliated clubs so I did some research on that issue. I think there are a lot of ARRL benefits that aren't well known or at least not as well as they should be.