Last weekend was the biggest SSB radio contest of the year, CQ WW and I decided to put in an entry. I expected things to be slow going because we’re pretty much still at the bottom of the solar cycle. I was pleasantly surprised. Both 20m and 15m were full from bottom to top and […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
For the last couple of months, I’ve not done much in the way of traditional radio, largely down to the fact that I’ve been really busy at work. I’ve had lots to do and I’ve spent a month working away from home either on training courses or in meetings preparing for a very large project. […]
A week or so ago I saw a weather fax (WEFAX) picture someone had posted that they’d captured on HF. This grabbed my attention because I like maps and I like to see things to do with the weather. I’d tried a couple of years ago to receive satellite weather pictures with little success (due […]
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 […]
To start with, I’ll post the basic statistics for the entire year of 2018 and then go into the background. QSOs made: 3789 Unique QSOs made: 2962 Average QSOs per day: 10.4 Days missed: 0 <- This is the most important statistic, it means that QSO365 #2 was a success. DXCC entities worked: 160 New […]
I go through phases of not sleeping very well and I’m in the middle of one of those right now. Yesterday evening after a very bad night previously, I went to bed relatively early in the hope that because I was so exhausted, I might actually drop off quickly. No such luck, two hours later […]
