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Murmurs from the Earth... | Whispers from the Sky
I had originally planned to make a maintenance and upgrade visit to my instrumentation in American Samoa in February 2016. There are lots of advantages to February: It’s cold here in W3, the ARRL DX CW contest is in February, and the phenomenon I’m studying is most active during the equinoxes. I scheduled a 7-day trip that ended with the weekend of ARRL DX so I had the opportunity work through the weekend or play some radio if work went better than expected.
My flight had been booked out of Washington National (DCA) airport at 5:15 am Monday morning, which is the best possible time of day at the worst possible airport. A snowstorm of unknown magnitude was bearing down on the mid-Atlantic. And, around 4:00 pm on Sunday afternoon, I fell asleep on the couch. When I awoke 90 minutes later, it rapidly became clear that I had a nasty stomach flu. As my condition deteriorated further, I finally decided I didn’t want to be fighting that for the next 24 hours on 76
The trip was rescheduled for three weeks later in March and I managed to get this itinerary out of BWI, which is much more convenient. I loaded up my gear and went to the airport at 4:00 am. My upgrade had cleared so I didn’t pay excess on my overweight and extra Pelican cases. Hurray for small victories! We sat at the end of the runway on the tarmac doing the preflight checks and the cabin lights started flickering intermittently. And we sat, and we sat. And, we returned to the gate and sat some more.
AmateurRadio.com • Ham Radio Blog
Murmurs from the Earth... | Whispers from the Sky