Sunspots - Tuesday November 28th 2017

Solar flux is 74 today and the sunspot number 15. A=5 and K=2.

MLS offers

MLS is offering some winter savings. For example, the ICOM IC7300 ships with a free PSU worth £89.95. Price drop soon? It should be much less by now.

See https://www.hamradio.co.uk/amateur-radio-base-station-radio-icom-base-station-radio-pc-309.php

Low cost UHF portables?

Gearbest is advertising 2pcs (which I take to mean 2 transceivers) for about £24 on eBay. The last time (the only time) I bought from them I ordered 2 pcs, but only got sent one transceiver. Despite lots of communications with them including copies of my order, they insisted I only ordered one. When I threatened to tell PayPal, I got a full refund.

Basically I concluded that they do not understand English. If you order 2pcs, you may end up with just one.  Good prices, but their customer service is lacking. Caveat emptor.

See https://www.gearbest.com/walkie-talkies/pp_775271.html

630m WSPR

For the last hour or so I have been on 630m WSPR TX (10mW ERP, 20%) and RX. So far, 9 unique station spots of my QRPP with best DX a spot by G0LUJ (278km) in the north of England. No international reports as yet.

137kHz WSPR RX

At some point I intend to take a look at 137kHz WSPR. At present I can only receive and not transmit. Also, my RX is deaf and my antenna poor. Still, "nothing ventured, nothing gained" as they say. In other words, it is worth a go. If I copy anything on LF, that would be a bonus! I might copy the stronger  stations. Maybe later this week?

I should also try my coax outer, used as my antenna on 630m, on other bands.  I can TX on any HF band.

17kHz VLF tests (amateur)

Stefan DK7FC who is well known for his sub-9kHz tests recently applied for special permission to test around 17kHz with a low ERP.

"Hi VLF,

Since 23 UTC a 700 mA carrier is running on 17.4701 kHz!
It is a little surprise to the VLF community i think ;-)

Legal? Yes: http://www.iup.uni-heidelberg.de/schaefer_vlf/VLF/17,47kHz_Sonderlizenz.jpg
Actually the document has 3 pages but the other ones are no so relevant.
My ERP is limited to 5 mW. I did not request more because more isn't possible anyway with this antenna.

I wound a big single layer coil with 0.5 mm enameled wire on a PVC tube with 315 mm outher diameter.
0.7 A is just a first careful step. The coil is designed to hold 1.5 A 'key down'.
The carrier will run the whole night and even tomorrow at daytime.

Worldwide reports are welcome ;-)
It is not sub-9-kHz but still VLF, the 17 km band!! So give it chance :-)

The tree has still some solar power to stream the signal from the EW loop down to the city, so there is a feedback spectrogram at http://www.iup.uni-heidelberg.de/schaefer_vlf/DK7FC_VLF_Grabber2.html

73, Stefan

PS: I still can hear that tone of the coil. It is terrible! Be happy when you are older than me!"

UK amateur licences

Southgate News has a report on the number of UK amateur licences according to data released under a Freedom of Information request by OFCOM. The data (not in a clear form) shows the numbers from 2010 to now. I think it shows a peak in 2014 in full licences, but numbers rising for the foundation licences, but I found it not easy to extract. It looks like a dump of data held on a database with no attempt to be very helpful.

See http://southgatearc.org/news/2017/november/uk-ham-radio-license-statistics-released.htm#.Whvd4bp2tMs .

Sunspots - Monday November 27th 2017

Solar flux is 76 and the sunspot number 16. A=3 and K=1.

10m FT8

Not a promising start. I have been on 10m FT8 RX since before breakfast, but nothing so far. Things may change.

UPDATE 1012z: Nothing.

UPDATE 1400z: Just a couple of UK stations spotted so far, probably aircraft reflections.

UPDATE 1732z: A couple of Italians spotted on 10m FT8 RX. I have now QSYed to 630m.

Quiet MF overnight

With my 10mW ERP 630m WSPR only copied by 6 unique UK stations last night and only 10 unique spots of others, last night was not great.