I’ll kick off with the statistics for the whole of 2021 and then go into the details. QSOs made: 8,265Unique QSOs made: 5,776Average QSOs per day: 22.6Days missed: 0 <- This is the most important statistic, it means that QSO365 #3 was a success. DXCC entities worked: 168New DXCC entities worked: 1Total DXCC worked and […]
Over the weekend I was operating in the World Wide Digi DX contest and I wondered if I could get a screen capture of my TS-890 just as I started transmission. I reached over and as the radio went into transmit, I hit the screen capture button and this is the result. As you can […]
I happened to look at my emails and noticed that someone had posted to an email reflector I’m a member of that 5I3W (Tanzania) was on 20m SSB. The post had been made just a few minutes earlier so I switched on the wireless and tuned to the appropriate frequency. I was just in time […]
Oh this is going to bring the haters to the fore! Not only is it an 48 hour contest but it’s a 48 hour contest using FT8. Mind you, as it’s FT8, it only takes up a few kHz of the spectrum in an area that’s not used for SSB or CW so it shouldn’t […]
In my last post, I said that I’d be replacing the broken Expert with a valve amplifier and I’ve done just that. I now have an Acom 1500 sitting on the shelf in my shack. There simply wasn’t enough room on my desk to fit the amplifier and the Kenwood TS-890 so I had to […]
Long term readers will remember that in November 2011 I bought myself an Acom 1000 amplifier and that really was a super piece of equipment. It served me faultlessly and worked without any issues whatsoever. It alerted me a few times to aerial faults but just soldiered on and on and on. Over time, there […]
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 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 […]
Towards the end of last year, my attention was drawn to the RSGB HF awards and I realised that I probably qualified to apply for some of them. I downloaded the check sheets for the IARU Region 1 Award and the Commonwealth Century Award and over the course of the next couple of evenings, I […]
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 […]
