First licensed in 1994, I've been active on HF since about 1995. My original paper logs from those days have been long-since lost, but my later years are well documented.

2024 was by far my most successful operations to date. The solar cycle is peaking which made for some very rewarding DXing, and I was also active in multiple contests including CW-WW, Field Day, and November Sweepstakes both CW and SSB.

I also had 10 separate POTA park activations throughout the year which added to my numbers.

2024 Stats

• Contacts: 1,487
• States: 50
• Countries: 83
• Continents: 5

The 2024 statistics below show a marked increase in activity over prior years.

Notable Station Changes

I spent considerable time this year working on station organization, documentation, and automation.

For organization, I constructed a set of shelves that allow me to stack equipment vertically, while still providing air flow for cooling, and easy access to the rear panels for cabling and maintenance.

Documentation of the station consists largely of the pages on this site, as well as a private Word document where I keep notes about specific configuration settings, and some of my thought processes behind the decisions that were made. I also keep notes from the radio contests to help me strategize my time in future years.

Automation has come a long ways this year with remote power, remote antenna switching, and rig control. It's not quite where I want it, but I was able to operate remotely out of a hotel room one weekend while I was stuck in a hotel, which was enjoyable.

Other improvements included upgrading to a solid state KPA-500 amplifier which increased my band switching speeds and reducing my QRM while tuning.

• Contacts: 721
• States: 50
• Countries: 32
• Continents: 4

Notable Station Changes

2023 was the first year I had a tri-band Yagi back on the air since around 2004. Despite only being at the 35' level, it performs remarkably well and really makes getting through pile-ups a breeze.

I also purchased a Yaesu FT-891 portable rig which I'm primarily using for Parks on the Air (POTA) activations. POTA is opening up a whole new area of operation, and is combining nicely with some of our other outdoor and camping hobbies.

• Contacts: 415
• States: 49
• Countries: 4
• Continents: 3

• Contacts: 308
• States: 49
• Countries: 3
• Continents: 2

There are some free and paid tools out on the Internet for creating and analyzing log files, none of them did quite what I wanted. The fundamental problem is that contacts aren't inherently geocoded when they're logged, meaning there's no latitude/longitude coordinates to plot the station with.

To fix the geocoding issue, I found that QRZ.com can return latitude and longitude coordinates of a given contact or callsign.

Initially what I did was download my QRZ.com logbook back down from QRZ in an ADIF format. Then I used a Python script to parse apart the ADIF file and extract the Latitude, Longitude, and QSL Via fields from that log. Within the Python script, I opened up my N3FJP Amateur Contact Logbook file and performed SQL UPDATE statements to populate three custom fields with the information gleaned from QRZ.

Once that data was in the database, I could use Microsoft PowerBI which is a free enterprise visualization and dashboarding tool to display information from the logbook. The graphical dashboards shown above are all examples of PowerBI.

Now that the initial backfile of all of my contacts going back to the beginning of my log are populated, I have a second Python script that will look at the Amateur Contact Logbook and search for blank latitude/longitude records, and will make an API call out to QRZ to request the geocoded information for that specific callsign. This is the tool that I now use to keep my logbook up to date, rather than downloading a massive ADIF file.

All of these scripts and the dashboard can be found on my GitHub page.

• Amateur Contact Log Update Scripts
• QRZ.com Web Logbook
• Amateur Contact Log