It’s been a while since I made a semi-serious contest entry and I happened to notice a couple of weeks ago that the CQ WPX RTTY contest was coming up. I currently hold the England record for the 15m high power section and so I planned to try and beat that this year. I […]
Category: HF
20m QRSS warmup
I’ve had this screenshot sitting on my desktop for a while because I think it’s quite interesting. It shows my 20m QRSS signal from when I switched the transmitter on, for a period of nearly four hours. You can see how it takes almost an hour to warm up and calibrate itself to the correct […]
I’m not dead!
I know I’ve not updated this blog for some months but don’t panic, I’m not actually dead! Although I’ve not done much operating this year, I have still been playing radio. I’ve been melting a lot of solder building WSPR and QRSS transmitters and there’s normally some RF being transmitted on an HF band somewhere […]
My 10m vertical broke in the storms
Friday night was very windy over here on the east coast and when I went to bed I noticed that there was more noise than normal coming through my aerials. Normally I can hear the wind gently whistling through the mast and the Hexbeam but there was an actual rattle coming from somewhere which is […]
JARTS WW RTTY Contest 2013
In my last post I mentioned that I’d put my 40m vertical up and was hoping to work some new DXCC entities on 40m during the Japanese Amateur Radio Teleprinter Society (JARTS) contest. Well the band was pretty noisy but I did manage pick up three new entities – Alaska, Canary Islands and Uzbekistan. I […]
Putting up a 40m vertical for the winter
Last weekend, following the Martello Tower Group DXpedition to Herm Island, I put up a 40m vertical in my back garden. Not just any 40m vertical, it’s exactly the same one we used to great success on Herm. It’s made up of a 12m Spiderpole with a 1/4 wave vertical element and around 30 radials. […]
A week of very low power 10m WSPR
Last Sunday I tweaked my Ultimate 2 transmitter to give me some power out on 10m and I managed to persuade it to run about 80-100mW. I’m going to experiment with a higher voltage for perhaps a little more power but in the meantime I decided to run it for a week. As I’m using […]
Winding coils and building filters
Some time ago I posted saying that I’ve been winding lots of coils and since then I also mentioned that I started work on a set of 5B4AGN filters and some of those was shown here. Since then, I’ve completed a full set of low pass filters for my WSPR/QRSS transmitter and here they all […]
A World First – Experiments on the 60m (5 MHz) band with QRSS
The 60m band is fairly new amateur radio allocation, first introduced in 2002 but only to a few countries such as the United Kingdom, Finland, Denmark, the USA, Ireland, Iceland and Norway. I had an experimental Notice of Variation for 5 MHz on my licence a few years ago and I renewed it when we […]
Running WSPR and QRSS [almost] at the same time
Last month I mentioned that I’d bought a new kit, the “Ultimate 2” transmitter from Hans Summers. I hooked it up with a GPS module and it almost worked perfectly. There were a couple of issues with 2.01 of the firmware and I assisted with beta testing the 2.02 firmware. While testing it, I made […]
