One of the new local Foundation licence holders recently did the Intermediate course and exam and as part of her practical assessment, she built a capacitance meter which I’m sure helped her pass the course. Well done, Caroline! I fancied doing the same as it’s a handy piece of test gear that I’ve never owned. […]
I’ve not been specifically chasing new DXCC entities for a while and because of this, I’ve only picked up four since 2015. I know there’s been some interest surrounding the 3C0L and 3C1L DXpedition to Annobon and Equatorial Guinea respectively over the last few weeks and although I missed out on working 3C0L, I was […]
Strange as it might seem, I’ve never put in a good solid single band entry into the CQ WW SSB contest. If you look at the recent addition to this site, my contest results page then you can see that I came third (out of three) in 2013 for my 15m entry, first (out of […]
My challenge to work DXCC on 17m using FT8 is coming along nicely – I’ve now worked fifty separate entities as follows. Although I’m not going to go out of my way to get them confirmed because Logbook of The World and the DXCC award system doesn’t differentiate between different data modes, it’s good to […]
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 […]
