Month: December 2010

That’s pretty much it for 2010

I don’t expect to be doing any serious radio for the next few days.  Yesterday evening was the last of the RSGB UKAC Contests that the Martello Tower Group are taking part in this year and unexpectedly today I was able to give away a few points in the last of the Christmas Cumulatives on […]

Christmas!

Yes, it’s Christmas, no, I’ve not had much chance to do anything really on the wireless. I worked a couple of stations last week but nothing really of note and I’ve just had a nice couple of hours in the second of the RSGB Christmas Cumulatives.  I’ll have another go tomorrow and then I’m back […]

QSOs, a contest and a new callsign

I’ve had a couple of nice although quick QSOs on 40m over the last two nights.  I’m now suffering from some quite serious interference on all bands from 160m up to 15m which I think is coming from some Christmas lights in the street so it’s tricky for me to work much in the evening […]

10MHz QRSS Transmitter kit

I mentioned yesterday that I’d been building a QRP Labs 30m QRSS transmitter so I thought I’d go into a bit more detail here.  QRS is accepted as the Q-code for ‘please send slower;  in Morse and QRSS is a derivative of that in that it means ‘send extremely slowly’. Very slow Morse code is […]

Spain and a new square

Every Saturday I take a drive to Frinton-on-Sea to stock up on bread for the week.  I’d done the shopping and was just getting back into the car when my phone pinged at me to tell me I had a new email.  I glanced at it and saw that it was a DX-Sherlock warning of […]

My son passed his Foundation Exam!

After a brief period of study, my son David sat and passed the Foundation Exam at Colchester Radio Amateurs yesterday.  He’s not shown any real interest in radio in the past but about three months ago I bought the Foundation Now! book and passed it to him to see if anything sparked.  It did and […]

144MHz UKAC Contest, December 2010

Last night was the final 144MHz UKAC Contest of 2010 – I’ve been putting in entries all this year as part of the Martello Tower Group and for a small group, I think we’re doing very well. Yesterday was my daughters birthday so it would have been very unsociable of me to go to the […]

144MHz Affiliated Societies Contest – Part 2

Following on from my entry yesterday about the 144MHz AFS Contest, I’ve done some detective work and found out the results from the 1990 contest I mentioned. I finished 12th out of 91 entries in my section and I was part of the Colchester Radio Amateurs group who finished second out of 37 societies.  My […]

144MHz Affiliated Societies Contest

Tomorrow (Sunday 5th December 2010) is the 144MHz Affiliated Societies Contest.  This is a contest that I have a real soft spot for as it was the first contest I ever put a serious entry in to back in 1982.  I’ve taken a trip down memory lane and dug out my old logbooks to see […]

‘wireless’

It’s been mentioned to me that I often use the word ‘wireless’ instead of ‘radio’.  It’s not something I do consciously, I’ve always considered the words totally interchangeable and I suppose I just like the word.  I’ve been doing it since before such things as wireless networks became commonplace and for me it’s just natural.  […]