Last weekend was a bit of a disaster with just 41 QSOs in the Open Ukrainian RTTY Championship which was even more disappointing as I’d messed up the dates with the EA PSK63 contest. That particular contest was this weekend and so due to other commitments, I only had a few hours to play today with […]
Category: Amateur radio
The Open Ukrainian RTTY Championship 2012 – High Band
This weekend was the Open Ukrainian RTTY Championship which runs over three parts – The first two are “Low Band” which consists of 160m and 80m and the third part is “High Band” and that’s 40m, 20m, 15m and 10m. I’d managed to misread a contest calendar and had thought that the EA PSK63 contest […]
How to apply for the NoV for your Olympic and Jubilee special callsigns
I posted a while ago about the special callsign prefixes for the Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee here and I’m pleased to be able to report that the process to apply for these has now been published and it’s much simpler than it was for the Royal Wedding last year. There is a basic form […]
Statistics – February 2012
I put a lot of QSOs into the logbook during February, the majority of these were data contacts made during a couple of RTTY and PSK contests and I had a lot of fun doing them. I’ve got fldigi configured how I like it and I’m feeling pretty competent using it during contests. It doesn’t […]
More work on the Cushcraft MA-5B along with VSWR plots
After I replaced the balun and coax tails on my MA-5B, I posted recently to say I wasn’t quite as happy with the results as I could have been. I contacted Bob at Balun Designs who suggested that if I’d made the coax tails a different length to the originals that I may need to […]
Winding coils for various radio projects
Over the last few days I’ve found myself winding coils for construction projects. I dug out my MKARS80 kit from where it’s been sitting for the best part of a year and the next stage was fitting some trifilar wound transformers. These are made by lightly twisting together three lengths of 38swg enamelled wire and […]
The CQ WPX RTTY Contest 2012
Anyone who follows me on Twitter or reads this site will have noticed that I was planning on taking part in the CQ WPX RTTY contest last weekend and that I was keen to sort my aerial out in advance. I lowered the mast, fitted my new balun along with two new coax tails and […]
A replacement balun for my Cushcraft MA-5B from Balun Designs
After the investigative work a couple of weeks ago where I tracked the fault on my Cushcraft MA-5B to the cable between the balun (matching network) and the 12m/17m element I decided that I wanted to replace the entire balun, including the two coax tails out to the elements. I figured that because one tail […]
Statistics – January 2012
I’m keen to continue posting the monthly statistics posts so I can keep a track of how things are going and so that I can compare against last years figures. I’ve made over double the number of QSOs in January this year compared to 2011 and I’m slowly getting more countries confirmed on LoTW. My […]
Cushcraft MA5B is broken – and repaired
Last weekend was the Hungarian DX contest and I decided a few days prior that I was going to enter it. I planned on a single band entry which would allow me to spend a few hours on the Saturday afternoon and then come back again on Sunday morning when the band re-opened. I worked […]
