15m + 400w + snow/rain + Hexbeam = *sigh*

It’s the EA PSK63 contest. I had a decent run yesterday and this morning I was up nice and early to carry on my 15m single band entry. It snowed overnight, it’s raining now and very damp outside. After twenty minutes I was working a run of Japanese stations and my IMD meter started beeping […]

Sometimes it’s nice to have an unexpected day off

Due to unexpected circumstances, I ended up being at home today and once the reason for that was being dealt with, I decided to play radio for a while. I’ve been looking to work the TX5K DXpedition to Clipperton Island since the weekend.  I tried on Sunday but the pileups were absolutely massive and I […]

Open Ukraine RTTY Championship 2013

This contest has changed from last year – The new rules can be seen here and if I’m honest, I found some aspects to be a little confusing so I emailed the adjudicator to get some clarification. My entry was in the “High Band” rounds and I made just 157 QSOs on 15m with nothing […]

Statistics – February 2013

As the days start to lengthen, the higher bands start to work a bit better now that we’re slowly on the way out of winter and as a result I’m working a few more new DXCC entities.  This month I managed to work six new ones, these were Mali, Rotuma, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Solomon Islands […]

The results of the UK DX BPSK63 2013 contest

In January I entered the UK DX BPSK63 contest, the claimed scores showed that it was very close at the top.  The results have been published and I’m happy to report that after adjudication, I kept first place and although you can’t see from the image below, my score was the highest of any UK […]

Three new DXCC entities in just a few days

Now that I’ve worked over 240 DXCC entities, finding new ones is becoming a bit of a challenge and so it was very nice to pick up three new countries in just a few days this week. On Sunday last weekend I managed to work the 9U4U DXpedition to Burundi on 17m CW and then picked up […]

WSPR on 15m

For the last few days I’ve been running WSPR on 15m with 5w out of my radio into the Hexbeam, pointing east in the morning and west in the evening.  Here’s a map showing all activity over the last 24 hours. 15m is not a band that’s widely used for WSPR so there are nowhere […]

Statistics – January 2013

It’s February already, what happened to January?  It seems like only a few days ago that we started the new year.  It’s been a very busy month for me, the busiest ever for QSO numbers with over 1700 logged, largely down to three big data contests.  I managed to pick up two new countries in […]

Modifying my 40m delta loop to work on other bands

Back in June 2011 I put up a horizontal delta loop for 40m and I wrote about it at some length here.  Since then, I’ve made a few changes to my aerial for the lower bands, experimented with an off-centre fed dipole, a resonant dipole for 40m and a doublet fed through my SGC smartuner before […]

The results of the OK DX RTTY contest 2012

On the 15th December I took part in the OK DX RTTY contest and I blogged about it here.  Yesterday I was pointed at the results by OK1RIG and I have to say that this has to be one of the fastest sets of contest results I’ve seen so that’s great work by the Czech […]