On Thursday, 22 Jan, I received my ferrite chokes and I installed them all over my shack in an attempt to damp down the RFI.
On Saturday, 24 Jan, I received a dummy load (why did I not have one of these earlier?) which I used to verify all of the radio's setting inside my warm house vice setting up the Buddipole outside in the cold. After figuring out the best setting for my stock microphone and my after market headset/microphone combination, I buttoned everything up.
On Sunday, 25 Jan, I was outside at 0830 local to see if I could get some contacts. It was a balmy 34F and despite my coffee intake, was pretty chilled. I heard so many good contacts, including several overseas, and I couldn't get one. By this point, I had already verified that the AT-897 Plus was now working properly, but I bypassed it. Still nothing. At 0955, I went inside to go bother my wife and get some hot chocolate. I was so frustrated.
With a little heat, I decided to try one more thing. I went outside again, and I disconnected the after market headset/microphone combination. Instantly, things sounded different. Narrowing my eyes and wondering if it was really that easy, I tuned to a Winter Field Day participant and cautiously threw out my callsign.
"KM4EPR!" came back W0LWU. He gave me the required exchange, I passed my data, and bam - my first contact since Christmas day 2014. I was stunned.
In the next hour, I gathered up 7 QSOs total, including one from Canada (my first international QSO!). It was time for breakfast, and Winter Field Day was going to end in an hour, so I took everything down. HF is working!
That afternoon, I went out to meet Robert (W3AF) who was going to help me with my problems. I still wanted to meet with him in case I had missed something else, and so I could see how he operates on HF. He was incredibly helpful, and showed me how to manually tune the Buddipole antenna. He also showed me how to use the RigExpert AA-54 (I have got to get myself one of those!) and made a QSO to test the radio. After many funny and interesting stories, I have myself an elmer.
It was a great radio day.
Now if I can only get LoTW to function properly! At least I got my logbook updated, uploaded everything to eQSL, and sent out my QSL cards for the contacts.