I was playing with lumen5.com today – they make videos from your blog posts and other interesting stuff. It needed a URL to import for a demo, so I gave it the URL for this site and guess what – I see I have not posted on the site in over 2 years!

When everything in your hobby becomes “been there, done that” it might be time for a new hobby. Or at very least a change of direction.

In the two years, I have continued to do ham radio, but more and more for others and less and less for me. I have attended most of the usual events, but they blur with similarity to a point where I can’t really remember them apart.

When I started out in the hobby, it was SOTA. In fact, I got a radio license in order to do SOTA – to activate! I forced my way up Lady’s Slipper on the 1 May this year for a SOTA activation – 1 point! And the last time I activated was the SOTA activity day LAST YEAR – almost a year to the day since my last SOTA.

I am chasing now, when I can. Not quite what I signed up for.

I have done a lot in this hobby – and not just events and SOTA. I have given Hammies courses and that has been very rewarding. I have worked DX – although never paying for the certificates, I have Mixed, Digital, 15, and 20m “DXCCs” with 40m and 10m both in the 90s (40m has been on 99 now for about 6 months!). 17m is next with phone also getting close now. I have worked all continents, worked all Africa, worked all zones, and even WAZS 500. I need three more states for WAS. All this from a modest station with 100W, a piece of wire in the form of a home-made non-rotatable center-fed fan dipole.

I seem to be in the part of the hobby where I do more “admin” or “management” than actual radio. I often can’t take part in a contest because I’m the scorer.

I used to be involved in HAMNET here in the Eastern Cape, but that too seems to have dried up into nothing. I can’t remember the last time we did anything! A few years ago I (single handedly) ran a national black out exercise. Nothing much has happened since then. I am the scorer for the HAMNET 40m Simulated Emergency Contest and last time around there was not even 1 ZS2 entry! Even the PEARS contest seems to be void of local support.

Is it time to go QRT? Perhaps, a change in direction could help? One last thing on my “radio bucket list” is a DXPedition. After that all bets are off!

73 ZS2DH