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 […]
Power is always an emotive subject so I thought it would be interesting to review transmitter power levels and see what difference increasing power makes to your signal. To start with we need to look at how signals strength is measured. In 1981 the IARU Technical Recommendation R.1 was that S9 on the HF bands […]
If you use any of the data modes for QSOs such as JT65, JT9, or FT8 or if you operate using WSPR then you’ll know how important it is that your computer clock is accurate. Anything more than a couple of seconds out and you won’t decode anything and nobody will decode your signal. On […]
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 […]
Earlier this year I decided it was time to replace my doublet with a new wire aerial. There was nothing actually wrong with the doublet, I’ve worked plenty on it but it always galled me that I had a smarttuner connected to it which limited my transmit power. I could only run 100W SSB or […]
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 […]
This is one of the very few non amateur radio related items on this site. I’m posting it because it’s a useful tip and I hope that it will assist fellow Mac users. I noticed about three years ago that a particular cache folder on my iMac was getting larger and larger. I did some […]
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 […]
Not long after my last post on this subject, back in January, the preamp I had mounted in the box at the top of 30ft of pole strapped to the side of my house failed and I was forced to removed that particular ADS-B aircraft tracker. I still had my loft unit running and working […]
