As the days start to lengthen, the higher bands start to work a bit better now that we’re slowly on the way out of winter and as a result I’m working a few more new DXCC entities. This month I managed to work six new ones, these were Mali, Rotuma, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Solomon Islands […]
Category: Amateur radio
The results of the UK DX BPSK63 2013 contest
In January I entered the UK DX BPSK63 contest, the claimed scores showed that it was very close at the top. The results have been published and I’m happy to report that after adjudication, I kept first place and although you can’t see from the image below, my score was the highest of any UK […]
Three new DXCC entities in just a few days
Now that I’ve worked over 240 DXCC entities, finding new ones is becoming a bit of a challenge and so it was very nice to pick up three new countries in just a few days this week. On Sunday last weekend I managed to work the 9U4U DXpedition to Burundi on 17m CW and then picked up […]
WSPR on 15m
For the last few days I’ve been running WSPR on 15m with 5w out of my radio into the Hexbeam, pointing east in the morning and west in the evening. Here’s a map showing all activity over the last 24 hours. 15m is not a band that’s widely used for WSPR so there are nowhere […]
Statistics – January 2013
It’s February already, what happened to January? It seems like only a few days ago that we started the new year. It’s been a very busy month for me, the busiest ever for QSO numbers with over 1700 logged, largely down to three big data contests. I managed to pick up two new countries in […]
Modifying my 40m delta loop to work on other bands
Back in June 2011 I put up a horizontal delta loop for 40m and I wrote about it at some length here. Since then, I’ve made a few changes to my aerial for the lower bands, experimented with an off-centre fed dipole, a resonant dipole for 40m and a doublet fed through my SGC smartuner before […]
The results of the OK DX RTTY contest 2012
On the 15th December I took part in the OK DX RTTY contest and I blogged about it here. Yesterday I was pointed at the results by OK1RIG and I have to say that this has to be one of the fastest sets of contest results I’ve seen so that’s great work by the Czech […]
The UK DX BPSK63 2013 contest
Last weekend I was pleased to take part in the UK DX BPSK63 contest – This contest was RTTY in 2012 but has changed to PSK63 this year. I generally prefer operating RTTY to PSK but there’s no doubt that PSK63 is quicker than RTTY and more stations will fit into the available bandwidth. This […]
QSLing – Is this in the spirit of Amateur Radio?
In April last year I made two QSOs with a group of people on a DXpedition to an African country, this was a new DXCC to me and after the trip I looked up the callsign on qrz.com where it listed a QSL manager. I checked that callsign on qrz.com and it confirmed that he […]
Amplifier broken? Aerial broken? Coax broken? What?
On 29th December I attempted to have a go in the World Wide Iron Ham contest. I wasn’t planning on a big entry but was just going to run for a couple of hours to have a break from the Christmas festivities. I fired everything up as usual but when I started transmitting, my Acom 1000 displayed […]
