My K1EL Winkeyer USB is on its way (I hope…)

Exactly a month ago I ordered a Winkeyer USB from K1EL. It was shipped through USPS (with tracking) on July 28.

A few days later the track got lost… at the moment Bpost, the belgian postal service, took over.

Today, 13 days after shipping in the US, nobody seems to know where the package is. I can guess it is stuck in Brussels Airport and the BPOST bureaucracy needs a lot of time to send me a letter for paying the import duties.

Note to myself (and to whom it may concern :-)): BPOST sucks when you have to get a package from abroad.

Update: after being lost in cyberspace somewhere my keyer has arrived. Extra costs: €30,84 => 21% VAT (= some €12,60) and the rest for the BPOST and customs bureaucracy.
Finally my Winkeyer costs about 50% more in Belgium than in the US.

I doubled, even nearly tripled the number of CW QSOs in my log…

Some 18 years after I passed the Belgian 12 wpm morse exam I decided to dust of my 1995 Schurr Profi 2 and start making some CW QSO’s again. So last weekend I worked 42 stations during the IARU HF contest.

With only 33 qso in the log until last friday this more than doubled my qso number in CW 🙂

I guess it’ll take me some years before I will be contesting at the speeds I heard this weekend though… Some of those stations seemed to be working at some 3000 wpm. One station used some trick to slow down about 1 CQ-call out of 3. Probably some clever usage of the macros in N1MM?

Anyhow, I had a lot of fun and I’ll keep practicing to get my speed and accuracy up!