This last weekend was the CQ World Wide DX CW Contest and I decided at short notice that I’d spend some time operating. I was planning on being out for most of the day on Saturday but had nothing arranged for Sunday which would give me a few hours. I actually managed half an hour […]
In 2017 I entered and won the 15m section of the SCC RTTY Championship and although I wasn’t available for the full 24 hours of the contest this year, I did make a token entry by operating for around four hours on the Sunday morning. The problem was that on the Sunday, conditions had absolutely […]
A gorgeously lovely summer means I spent less time on the wireless for these three months, making just over 600 QSOs and working only 80 DXCC entities. My data / phone / CW ratio is still about the same as earlier in the year and I’ve picked up three new entities on 160m and two […]
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 […]
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 […]
Earlier this month I heard 5A1AL calling CQ on 17m and managed to work him fairly quickly. My log showed him as an “All Time New One” (ATNO). When I looked at his qrz page, he mentioned that he uses ClubLog so I checked my callsign there against his log and was very surprised to […]
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 […]
