[VHFcontesting] Not QRV January contest

[Paul N1BUG FN55mf]

It's no secret my love of VHF contesting has diminished greatly over the 
last few years for a variety of reasons. Bottom line, it's not the fun 
it used to be. However, I do usually try to make an appearance and at 
least work some "neighbors" and friends!

This time I will not be on. On the morning of January 3, shortly after 
giving K3SK a new state on 2 meters, my shack PC suddenly shut down. I 
was able to reboot it only after several hours of work and then 
intermittently and it wouldn't stay running long. This was not 
altogether unexpected, as it had been showing signs of hardware problems 
for a while. It all started with an ugly power failure that somehow 
fried one CPU core! It ran OK for a while after that on 5 cores but then 
started getting erratic.

The only short or medium term solution was to move my bench PC to the 
ham shack. Having just the one computer, located in the shack, is 
inconvenient in many ways but it does have the advantage of reducing 
electricity costs significantly if I am on the air much. That should 
allow me to be on the air more than I have been for the past few years. 
And it will force me to be in the shack more, probably not a bad thing.

The transition has not been entirely smooth. I have a USB sound 
interface that works only after one to several power cycles of the 
device. It is always recognized by the operating system and applications 
but there is no audio in or out until eventually a hard restart gets it 
sorted out. This is a strange one. More importantly, due to another 
hardware problem I cannot band switch to 144, 222 or 432. I could build 
a manual switch as a temporary workaround but I have so much work left 
to do with this whole computer swap I have just kept driving toward a 
long term solution that restores 100% of former functionality. I have 
hardware on the way that should get band switching back to normal but it 
won't be here until next week.

Financial barriers aside, it would be far less stressful to have a tower 
fall over!

Have fun, and I will (hopefully!) be on for the next one!

73,
Paul N1BUG FN55mf