“DXCC is Amateur Radio’s premier award that hams can earn by confirming on the air contacts with 100 countries” – ARRL I’m pleased to say that I reached this some weeks ago and submitted my application to the ARRL. I actually waited until I qualified for two awards, the initial ‘mixed’ and also for ‘phone’. […]
Category: Amateur radio
You can never have too many 0.1uF decoupling capacitors
A couple of weeks ago I needed to repair my iPod transmitter for the car and the fix was a simple one – Resolder the power supply cable and replace the decoupling capacitor because it had broken. The problem was that I had no ceramic disc 0.1uF capacitors. I ended up using a miniature multi-layer […]
Days 346 to 350 – Early morning and late evening JT65
With my mast down and just a 40m monoband dipole up at 15ft and my 10m vertical, I was quite limited in what I could do this week because I was actually worse off for aerials than I’ve been all year. I started with a long wire through the smarttuner so at least I could […]
Aerial is back up and the winch mechanism works perfectly
Today was the final test for my aerial installation and I’m pleased to report that everything went well. This morning, David, M6DHU and myself wrapped up warm and ventured out into the garden. We first lowered my 40m dipole and moved it out of the way then we proceeded to apply some anti-bird measures to […]
Days 344 and 345 – The ARRL 10m Contest
These two days were the ARRL 10m contest and I had high hopes for it. I had a mental target of 500 QSOs over the course of the weekend but things didn’t go as well as expected. I started off on Saturday morning and it was difficult to get a run going and that really […]
Mast and aerial are down!
After the recent heavy winds in Scotland it’s now time for the south of the country to get them and we’re forecast winds of up to 65 mph at some point over the next few days which equates to Storm Force 10. My Alimast from Aerial-Parts of Colchester hasn’t been lowered since it went up. […]
Days 337 to 343 – Aerial work at the Martello Tower and the 2m UKAC
I had a nice lot of QSOs on day #337, largely on the higher bands again. I was up at a reasonable time and had a couple of CQ shouts on 10m, first working UV3QF, Igor and UA6BCB, Vlad. I was then nicely surprised to be called by ZL4CZ, Steven who was a nice loud […]
Planning permission – I had a visit and a letter from the council
Planning permission is a subject I’ve steered clear of on this blog for one main reason. I don’t have any. I used to have a twenty foot pole on the side of my house with a seventeen foot long 2m beam for over fifteen years along with an 18ft vertical colinear for 2m/70cms, all with […]
Days 334, 335 and 336 – Not much happening
This is a very small update. The bands have been really dead in the evenings and the fact that I didn’t have an aerial for 40m following it falling down means it’s been a difficult three days. Day #334 was when the aerial fell down, I worked EA3DTD, Toni on 40m using half a dipole […]
Aerial down!
Yesterday I got home in the evening, switched the wireless on and had a couple of QSOs, one of which was on 40m. Much later, just as I was about to go to bed my wife suddenly said “Oh, I forgot to tell you, your long dangly thing has fallen down”. It appears that some […]
