In my last post, I said that I’d be replacing the broken Expert with a valve amplifier and I’ve done just that. I now have an Acom 1500 sitting on the shelf in my shack. There simply wasn’t enough room on my desk to fit the amplifier and the Kenwood TS-890 so I had to […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
My DXCC count of worked and confirmed stations has been slowly increasing over the last few years and I’ve received QSLs from every entity I’ve worked except for Iran. I’ve only made one QSO with a station in Iran and up until late last year, I’ve not chased for the QSL card due to the […]
What a difference five years and nearly half of a solar cycle makes. Last weekend I entered the OK DX RTTY contest and upon checking my log, I realised it’s been five years since I last operated in this contest. In December 2012 we were approaching solar maximum and conditions were excellent. Five years later, […]
Back in September I put an entry in to the SCC RTTY Championship and I’m happy to report that the results are out and can be seen in full here. I entered the single operator 15m section and I’m pleased to report that out of the fifteen entries, I was first. I logged 190 QSOs but […]
Looking back at my old contest entries, I noticed that I’d never made a serious entry into CQ WW RTTY on 15m in the past and have always concentrated my efforts on CQ WPX RTTY instead. I’ve won the Single Operator, High Power 15m section four times in the past for stations in England and […]
It’s been some considerable time since I put in any serious contest entry and I’ve been looking for the chance to do it for a few weeks. I sorted out my data problems a while ago and have been happily able to operate RTTY, PSK, etc ever since. I’ve been looking for a data contest […]
