Some years ago I purchased a Porta Paddle II iambic paddle kit from American Morse Equipment. It’s a nice solid compact paddle. I purchased it primarily to use mobile while operating in state QSO parties. The last couple of years I’ve also used it for a few SOTA activations.

After a while I started having intermittent keying problems where I’d miss an occasional dit. The paddle uses the hinges/pivots for the ground connection.

I’ve owned a US Tower MAB-550MDP crank-up tower since about 1990.  This is a 55′ tubular crank-up with motorized winch and positive pull down.  My current QTH is the fourth location I’ve installed this tower.  It’s been up at this location since 2002.

For a couple of years I’ve had problems with the CMP/PWR encoder on my K3. When I needed to reduce power to use my amp or increase power back to 100 watts I’d have to twist and twist the power control. Recently there was a thread on the Elecraft reflector of someone else having problems with one of their encoders. That prompted me to finally replace my faulty encoder.

I recently purchased a 2015 Ford SuperDuty with a 6.7L Powerstroke diesel. The day after I picked up the truck I headed to AR and SC to visit family but also operate in those state’s QSO parties. I installed my Scorpion SA-680 on the bottom part of my 5th wheel hitch and ran the coax and antenna control cables from the bed through the back doors. The only grounding I had time to do was a strap from the bed to the cab. I quickly found the fuel injectors are apparently tuned to 20m as the RFI into my Elecraft K3 was terrible. Amazingly all the other bands are fairly quiet.

At the beginning of the ARRL 10M Contest a couple of weeks ago I noticed several “squalling” noises across the band. I had heard these before but hadn’t investigated. I thought it was probably from the Ethernet cabling in my house I decided to see if I could do something about it.