Earlier this year I decided it was time to replace my doublet with a new wire aerial. There was nothing actually wrong with the doublet, I’ve worked plenty on it but it always galled me that I had a smarttuner connected to it which limited my transmit power. I could only run 100W SSB or […]
It’s been some considerable time since I put in any serious contest entry and I’ve been looking for the chance to do it for a few weeks. I sorted out my data problems a while ago and have been happily able to operate RTTY, PSK, etc ever since. I’ve been looking for a data contest […]
There seems to have been an upsurge in people operating WSPR recently. Barely a day goes by (sometimes barely an hour) without someone posting a map of where their signals have been received on Twitter. When I first started experimenting with WSPR and QRSS some years ago, I did exactly the same. I’m quite sure […]
It’s been a while since I set myself a challenge and so it’s time for a new one. Despite my initial misgivings, I’ve decided that I do actually quite enjoy operating FT8. I’m attempting to work DXCC on 17m using the new FT8 data mode. Considering that in nearly 1,000 QSOs using JT65, I’ve only […]
I’ve posted a lot about the low power, low signal modes, JT65 and JT9 in the past and now there’s a new kid on the block. This one is called FT8 which stands for ‘Franke and Taylor, 8-FSK modulation’, developed by Steven Franke (K9AN) and Joe Taylor (K1JT). The biggest change from the slow, plodding […]
With the title to this entry, I can imagine a collective sigh from my readers, followed by “Oh no, not again”. This time is different though, this time it was nothing to do with RF or with melted insulators. A few weeks ago I decided to add some anti-bird measures to my aerial consisting of […]
An interesting subject came up on our 70cms voice repeater earlier today following an incident on a local DMR box yesterday and it got me thinking. There are a lot of 70cms repeaters in the UK with input frequencies between 430 MHz and 431 MHz and many people don’t realise that our licence only allows […]
I was recently looking through some old photographs and I found some pictures of my old radio shack and aerials from when I still lived at home. These photos would have been taken in the second half of 1991. The first photo is the inside of my ‘shack’ which was really just one side of […]
The Camb-Hams are on their usual annual pilgrimage to Scotland and I’ve worked them on a few bands and modes. I’ve also made a couple of recordings of them on 40m CW, showing how well the Kenwood TS-590SG can read Morse Code and on 40m and 80m SSB.
WSPR is great, I enjoy running WSPR and seeing how far I can transmit using very low power but there are a couple of drawbacks. I appreciate this will sound as though I’m knocking WSPR but trust me, I’m really not. Firstly, it’s not a QSO mode. I accept that many years ago, some QSOs were […]
