It was contest weekend just past so many were competing. I am a rag-chewer, not a contest hound, so I was mostly off the air. On top of that, the power was off for most of the week. It did come on sporadically for a few minutes at a time, but it was mostly out. Inconsistent power is almost harder to deal with than no power. At least with no power I could plan for a permanent source. But here it has been so sporadic - on for a few minutes, off for a few minutes, off again for awhile, on again for awhile. We have a large diesel generator which makes thunderous racket and has been around a few years so it is not an efficient machine to run. We seldom use it for those reasons. So we have a small Honda generator that we use to recharge laptop batteries and run the printers when we need to.

I found out this weekend that my antenna, even though it is a skinny vertical, has caused quite a stir in the village. We are located in Kiijaabewme (pronounced Chee-Job-Way- Mee), a small village on the outskirts of the city of Masaka. There are lots of small homes just around our compound. Well, I discovered this week that some of the residents have been scanning their radios trying to find my station, convinced I am a new broadcast radio station. There is a Baptist mission on the other side of the city that has its own radio station and the people here assumed I am doing the same. So I can imagine what stories will circulate once I put up a 40 foot tower and a log periodic with a long boom!

There is an informal net that meets at 14.325 each afternoon at 1500 UTC which I have been joining. The net control, as it were, is 7Q7HB in Malawi. Harry is that operator and he is at a hotel on Lake Malawi working as an engineer. The other two regulars are Allan, G0IAS, in Nottinghamshire, UK, and Graham, G4YRU in Sheffield, UK. Those three are old friends who keep in touch over the radio whenever Harry, who is also English, is working in Malawi. Graham worked in Uganda back in the 80's building a highway from the center of Kampala 20 kilometers out towards Jinja, the city at the headwaters of the Nile. All three of them are well-versed in dealing with the peculiarities of ham radio in Africa.