Day #46 saw two QSOs, first I spoke to EA3WD, Vic near Barcelona on 40m and then I moved to 80m and worked DF0AF, Klaus who was operating a special event station commemorating five years of the First Assistance Samaritan Team. I also had two QSOs on day #47, both on 80m with DF2DD, Carsten […]
What’s this?
I collected my old component rack from my mum’s loft a couple of weeks ago and in one of the drawers I found two pieces of breadboard with the same thing built on each of them. I built these when I was in my early teens and that’s quite obvious from the quality of the […]
Days 43, 44 and 45 – The birth of radar
I found day #43 quite difficult, there was a big contest taking place, the Dutch PACC contest and every single station I heard was calling CQ contest. The idea is to work as many Dutch stations as possible and I didn’t realise this to start with so I called and worked EA5DFV in Spain and […]
MKARS80 – Everything from bag two is fitted
The MKARS80 kit comes with all the parts in a number of bags, the previous blog post about it was when I’d completed bag number one and now spent some time fitting all the components from bag number two. I think it’s starting to look quite good.
Days 41 and 42 – A QSO on a new band
Day #41 saw just one QSO, that was with Andre, HB9HLM in Switzerland on 80m. On day #42 though I started off quite early and had a nice conversation with Rainer, DJ8CL on 40m. We spoke for about fifteen minutes and he advised me that my audio wasn’t too great so I made a few […]
Uzu in Ammeland
Uzu in Ammeland (Who’s who in Ham land) I first saw this published around thirty years ago and it probably needs a little explanation nowadays. There were no ‘M’ callsigns, no ‘2E’ callsigns and UK radio amateurs consisted of G2s, G3s, G4s and G8s. G2s, G3s and G4s were class A callsigns where the holders […]
Days 38, 39 and 40 – How bad can 80m be?
Day #38 started off well. It was the second round of the RSGB SSB 80m Club Championship and I’d planned on operating for the 90 minutes and attempting to beat my score of 30 QSOs from last month. In order to get nicely warmed up, I called CQ on the band an hour or so […]
MKARS80 – All the resistors are in
Inspired by listening to a couple of episodes of the Soldersmoke podcast, specifically Soldersmoke #130 I decided to ‘melt some solder’ this evening and pulled my MKARS80 kit back off of the shelf. I was given this as a Christmas present and all I’d done with it was to fit a handful of resistors. Tonight […]
Radio improvements – Tweaking things to make them better
I like things to work well. I like to tweak the best possible performance out of equipment and as such I’ll look into what I can do to make things better and do it. I’m not counting my current HF aerial in this as that was just thrown up at the spur of the moment […]
Days 35, 36 and 37 – A great ‘radio’ weekend
Day #35 was Friday and after work I had a quick word with Andy, IZ1MHQ on 40m. Later that evening I had a tune around on 80m and heard a really strong signal coming from HE3OM in Switzerland. It was a club station and I worked them and discovered that they were operating from Sottens […]
