Category: HF

Video of the ten minute multi QRPp mode transmission

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.

Running four QRPp modes in a ten minute frame

Over the last month or so I’ve been doing some experimenting using a newly built Hans Summers Ultimate 3S transmitter fitted with the new oven controlled crystal oscillator and I’m now running four different modes in a single ten minute frame with space at the end for a calibration cycle. You should note that to […]

Building a QRP Labs OCXO

The top of the completed OCXO

I’ve not posted much this year because I’ve not been doing much new stuff. I’m still messing around with the very low power modes and enjoying that a lot. I’m transmitting WSPR and QRSS all the time and tend to leave the transmitter running on one band/mode for a month or so at a time. […]

CQ WPX RTTY 2015

  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 […]

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

Close up of the broken section of my Sirio Gain Master 10m vertical

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

40m vertical in my back garden

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 […]