Wow! That’s taken a while. Back in August 2017 I set myself a challenge to work DXCC on 17m using just FT8. At the time, I described it as ‘the new FT8 mode’ and it really was in its infancy back then. I completed that challenge in March 2018 and then quietly set myself another […]
I’ve been using Apple computers for many years now and even though I’ve made a couple of previous blog posts about keeping the clock accurate on a Mac, those methods have never really been needed and I posted them as a sort of belt and braces addition to the built in time-keeping. However with macOS […]
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 […]
Over the last couple of months I’ve been concentrating on 30m using the dipole I installed late last year because I was keen to complete my 30m DXCC before the winter kicks in. Most of my contacts on 30m are using digital modes, either JT65, JT9 (remember them?) or FT8 and I knew that I’d […]
I woke up early this morning, about an hour and a half before sunrise and it occurred to me that if I were to switch the wireless on, I might get some greyline propagation. Sunrise was at 06:03 and first light at 04:44. I got up and fired up 30m FT8 which was pretty dead, […]
As radio amateurs, time is important to us and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), often called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the most important. We log our QSOs in UTC, (ideally) we give net times in UTC and our clocks need to be accurate to the second for data modes such as FT8, FT4, JT65, JT9 […]
I’ve never had a decent aerial for the 30m (10 MHz) band and have struggled to work much on the band either with my old doublet or the inverted L that I’ve had up for the last couple of years. About a month ago, I realised that I could hang a single band 30m dipole […]
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 […]
This weekend was the ARRL RTTY Roundup contest and for the first time, FT8 was allowed. I spent a couple of hours operating just to give away a few points and get some experience using the new version of WSJT-X in contest mode. I’d been working mainly European stations and all of a sudden, I […]
