A few days ago was the International Lighthouse Lightship Weekend and a group of locals under the umbrella of Colchester Radio Amateurs operated a special event station using the callsign GB6NT from the Naze Tower at Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex. This location is very close to me and I visited on both Saturday and Sunday. On […]
I keep a regular eye on the contest calendars as although I don’t have a lot of time for serious entries, it’s nice to be able to give away a few points. For example – I worked around one hundred stations in the IARU HF World Championship last weekend without too much effort. This weekend […]
Although this blog hasn’t been very active over the last few months, I’m still operating the radio regularly. The warmer weather has appeared in the UK and I’m spending a lot of time outside walking, riding my bike, eating ice-cream and topping up my sun tan. During the second quarter of 2018, I’ve made just […]
Last weekend saw the Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle which wasn’t an event I was particularly interested in but all UK radio amateurs were given the opportunity to use a special prefix to celebrate. The last time we were allowed to use a GR prefix was back in 2011. I applied for […]
** image has been updated as of 21/04/2018 to resolve the problems some people had booting their Pi ** Note: 01/01/2021 Due to the age of this, I can no longer provide support. I have tested it recently and it still works. If you’re having problems, please ensure you have read the article fully and […]
I’ve had a good first quarter of 2018, partly helped because I dropped the legs of my OCFD towards the end of last year, cable tied my smartuner to the bottom of the mast and put up an inverted L which gave me access to the lower bands. It works better than my old doublet […]
My 17m challenge to work 100 separate DXCC entities using only FT8 is complete. I expected it to take a lot longer than a mere seven months. I don’t have them all confirmed but that wasn’t part of the challenge – I just wanted to work them. In the last few days I’ve worked Hong […]
My last update on this challenge was back in October and I did very little towards it until the New Year. Since the last time I posted about this, I’ve worked an extra 27 DXCC entities on 17m using just FT8 taking me up to my current total of 77 entities worked. This brings my […]
My challenge to work DXCC on 17m using FT8 is coming along nicely – I’ve now worked fifty separate entities as follows. Although I’m not going to go out of my way to get them confirmed because Logbook of The World and the DXCC award system doesn’t differentiate between different data modes, it’s good to […]
Looking back at my old contest entries, I noticed that I’d never made a serious entry into CQ WW RTTY on 15m in the past and have always concentrated my efforts on CQ WPX RTTY instead. I’ve won the Single Operator, High Power 15m section four times in the past for stations in England and […]
