At about 1810z, my 4m FT8 was turned on. My compromise antenna is again the 2m big-wheel and coax tuned via the auto-ATU in the FT-710. After about 50 minutes, no spots.
UPDATE 2000z: No spots.
28 Mar 2023
South Devon - NOT amateur radio
As mentioned many times, I originally came from the South Hams in South Devon. I lived here until we came to Cambridge in the early 1970s. I get back there most years. My brother still lives there and I stay with him usually and travel down by train.
Cambridge spring - NOT amateur radio
This is the view of the university church, Great St Mary's yesterday. Cambridge is a fine city, especially in spring sunshine. This is the view from behind King's College Chapel
Operating on 10m
At the moment, 10m is again in great shape. Most days DX from across the world may be copied. Come May, June, July and August we see the peak Es season in the northern hemisphere which will allow DX up to about 1500km almost daily and some times further. F2 is currently very good. 10m is usually best for DX in the sunlight hours.
There even some single band multi mode 10m rigs available. These are based on CB radios, but can be very good as 10m radios.
There is little doubt that 10m (28MHz) is my favourite band of all. In the past I have used these with CB verticals very successfully on 10m.
See https://sites.google.com/view/g3xbm4/home/hf-mf-and-lf/10m-operation .
OFCOM
A reminder than OFCOM usually updates the data it holds on licences weekly. It has also published several documents this week. See the OFCOM website for details.
8m QRP FT8 (Tuesday)
At 0955z my 8m FT8 was turned on. I am not really expecting any spots. Currently, no spots!
UPDATE 1455z: No spots.
Italian food - NOT amateur radio
My son and grandson are away on different school trips to southern Italy. This is an example of the food.
27 Mar 2023
630m transverter
This was designed some years ago, but has appeared in QST and the RSGB book "LF Today".
I wanted a simple way of getting on this MF band and this was the result. Several have since been successfully built.
It produces about 10W into 50 ohms, but the ERP will be considerably lower depending on the antenna used. In my case, my "antenna" was just an earth-electrode "antenna" in the ground with the electrodes about 12m apart with the wire back to the shack along the fence not very high. I tried the wire on the ground and it made little difference. My theory is this forms a loop in the ground. The actual loop diameter will get larger as frequency is reduced. Such an antenna has been used for far field amateur TX tests (successfully) at well below 10 kHz.
Most nights my measured 10mW ERP was spotted in Norway on WSPR. It used the FT817ND in split mode TXing on 80m but receiving directly on 630m.
See https://sites.google.com/view/g3xbm4/home/hf-mf-and-lf/homebrew/630m-472khz-transverter .
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
