QSOs made: 2,022DXCC entities worked: 141New DXCC entities worked: 4Total DXCC worked and confirmed: 286 Solar cycle 25 is really starting to ramp up now and this is demonstrated clearly by the fact that for the first time in many years, the country I’ve worked the most is the USA with 436 QSOs. Unsurprisingly, 15m is […]
I posted back in January to say that the 17m element on my Hexbeam had snapped in the storms and was causing problems. It took over three months before everything came together to allow me to get the mast down and repair it but I managed it last weekend, just in time for the CQ […]
There’s been lots going on in my life throughout January but that hasn’t stopped me playing radio – I’ve made a point of sitting in the shack for a few minutes every day just to take my mind off of other things and as a result, I’ve managed nearly 550 QSOs so far working 73 […]
A couple of months ago, I started working on some upgrades to qso365 and I’m pleased to report that everything is now complete. The most obvious thing was the change of theme which controls how the website looks. The old theme was the original one I set up in 2010 and was starting to feel […]
Back in February, the UK was hit heavily by two overlapping storms, Ciara and Dennis and it was during these storms that my hexbeam took the hit that broke it. Here you can see the aerials being blown about badly and although I didn’t realise it at the time, the initial damage had already been […]
Nearly two weeks ago the UK suffered from ‘Severe storms’ with high winds across most of the country. I went outside in the rain on the Saturday morning, looked up at my aerial and was disappointed to see this. You can see the 40m element in the top is very loose and blowing freely in […]
At the end of July, I happened to glance up at my aerial and noticed the 15m element hanging down. It was broken. It didn’t look serious though and I was sure that it was just that the connector on the end of the element had snapped off. Around the same time, I was offered […]
About a month ago I bought a 1090MHz PCB aerial on eBay and immediately forgot about it. It arrived a few days ago and I had a good look at it before I connected it to anything to try and work out what it actually was. I decided from the construction that it was a […]
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 […]
Friday night was very windy over here on the east coast and when I went to bed I noticed that there was more noise than normal coming through my aerials. Normally I can hear the wind gently whistling through the mast and the Hexbeam but there was an actual rattle coming from somewhere which is […]
