There seems to have been an upsurge in people operating WSPR recently. Barely a day goes by (sometimes barely an hour) without someone posting a map of where their signals have been received on Twitter. When I first started experimenting with WSPR and QRSS some years ago, I did exactly the same. I’m quite sure […]
It’s been a while since I set myself a challenge and so it’s time for a new one. Despite my initial misgivings, I’ve decided that I do actually quite enjoy operating FT8. I’m attempting to work DXCC on 17m using the new FT8 data mode. Considering that in nearly 1,000 QSOs using JT65, I’ve only […]
I’ve posted a lot about the low power, low signal modes, JT65 and JT9 in the past and now there’s a new kid on the block. This one is called FT8 which stands for ‘Franke and Taylor, 8-FSK modulation’, developed by Steven Franke (K9AN) and Joe Taylor (K1JT). The biggest change from the slow, plodding […]
With the title to this entry, I can imagine a collective sigh from my readers, followed by “Oh no, not again”. This time is different though, this time it was nothing to do with RF or with melted insulators. A few weeks ago I decided to add some anti-bird measures to my aerial consisting of […]
The Camb-Hams are on their usual annual pilgrimage to Scotland and I’ve worked them on a few bands and modes. I’ve also made a couple of recordings of them on 40m CW, showing how well the Kenwood TS-590SG can read Morse Code and on 40m and 80m SSB.
WSPR is great, I enjoy running WSPR and seeing how far I can transmit using very low power but there are a couple of drawbacks. I appreciate this will sound as though I’m knocking WSPR but trust me, I’m really not. Firstly, it’s not a QSO mode. I accept that many years ago, some QSOs were […]
Toward the end of March I ran WSPR and QRSS on the 60m band for a couple of weeks. I did some experiments on 60m nearly three years ago which gave good results and I was keen to improve that. I posted on the new Knights QRSS list to announce that I would be active on 60m […]
Over the years I’ve used a few different VHF/UHF aerials here and the one I always found the best was my old Diamond X500. I bought that when I still lived at home with my parents and it moved here with me. It ran my original AX25 packet radio BBS and then MB7UIV and was only […]
I’ve been moving some boxes around recently and I unpacked the bandpass filters I built for one of the Martello Tower Group DXpeditions and successfully used again during our activation of the MV Ross Revenge in August 2016. It struck me that I’d never produced a full set of figures showing rejection on each band, insertion […]
After my entry a few days ago, I’ve made a video of my Hans Summers Ultimate 3S transmitter going through all four modes in a single ten minute frame. It’s annotated with comments along the way describing what’s happening at every stage.
