Long flights and learning

I'm in Seattle (Redmond, actually). The long flights between Boston and Dallas, and then Dallas and Seattle gave me a chance to just sit and think about a whole raft of things. I also had a chance to watch more of the PVRC DVDs of their Contest Seminar held in March 2005. (I looked on the PVRC web site to see if you can still order them, but came up empty.) The discs are in a 6 DVD set from a two day seminar that covered antennas and propagation, tower construction, terrain analysis, contest operating, ergonomics, logging, automation, and much more. The presenters are very experienced contesters. I wish I would have been at the seminar, but these DVDs are the next best thing.
Speaking of contesting seminars, there is a Contesting University seminar that will be held at Dayton this year. If you were already planning to attend Dayton this year, come a day early and take the class. I signed up the moment I heard about it last year.
Contesting and DXpeditioning are complimentary pursuits in my mind. Both efforts seek to get the most out of a limited time period and demand skills and knowledge that a rag-chewer may not need to have. I have found that things I've learned in one arena have led to epiphanies in the other.
The other thing I did on those long flights was read more of ON4UN's Low Band DXing book. This is really a fantastic piece of work. Even if you don't think you need this book, you need this book. Really. Recommended.