Ickworth (National Trust) - NOT amateur radio

Today, we went to Ickworth near Bury St Edmunds hoping to see the wild flower meadow in all its glory. What a total disappointment.

It looked as if, this year, they just did not bother. Afterwards we were told they were trying to fully restore the walled garden to as it once was. Does that mean vegetables next year? Luckily we spotted a bee, as the photo shows.

10m antenna

10m seems to be going out of fashion as we approach sunspot minimum. A few years ago, 10m was the band of choice for many to work worldwide DX. Now it is much harder.

For at least a quarter of any year Es brings 10m to life and DX across Europe or the USA is relatively easy.  On FT8 I am finding some amazing worldwide DX on 10m still. 10m is also a decent band for local QSOs often with far less noise than bands like 160, 80 or 40m. A horizontal antenna is generally less noisy than a vertical.

I know this has been on this blog before, but if you want a decent, simple, horizontal polarised antenna for 10m, you could do worse than make my Homebase-10 design. This was in PW and is on my main website. Buying all parts new, it will be hard to spend more than £10. It works well and is small as the picture shows.

The same design will scale for other bands like 6m or 4m.

10m WSPR TX (I almost forgot!)

Most of the morning my little 10m WSPR beacon has been on (500mW) and I have had 134 spots so far. Reports have come in from all over Europe including Sweden and the Faroes. No DX reports from outside Europe as yet today.

Actually, I almost forgot this beacon was on!

6m FT8 (mainly RX)

Yet again, I am back on 6m FT8. After a very brief CQ call earlier (2.5W, 2 UK spots) I am now RX only. There appears to be plenty of Es about.

Best DX currently on 6m FT8 RX is S01WS (3075km) in Western Sahara. So far, 21 different stations spotted in 9 countries on 6m FT8 RX.

UPDATE 1646z: 6m looks more like 20m! Plenty of Es again today and yet again more northern latitude stations logged. At the moment 6m FT8 is still good.

UPDATE 1725z: 21 countries spotted on 6m FT8 today. I have lost count of the number of stations.

UPDATE 2137z: Yet again I am spotting stateside stations on 6m FT8 RX. So far, on my very basic system, I have spotted 4 stations in the north of the USA or in Canada. Es? I somehow doubt this, but some sort of chordal E layer? Maybe. Signals are quite strong although I expect these stations are running high power and big beams.

July solar data

This is now available and shows how quiet the sun was last month with low sunspot numbers and low flux.

See http://www.solen.info/solar/

Insurance crappery - NOT amateur radio

Every year I get the same nonsense. I have never made a claim on my home insurance, yet the amount creeps up.

Yet again, I rang up and said it was too much. At first they offered to increase the excesses to which I replied , "no, I want the same policy but for less". Yet again I was offered a "loyalty bonus" and the premium dropped 15%. Such rubbish!!! Why not offer loyal customers decent premiums in the first place?

No doubt I shall have to do the same with my car insurance.

It really p**sses me off. It is all so unnecessary. They depend on customers just paying up and not complaining. No doubt I shall have to ring up next year too.

Miracles do happen on 6m

This is probably my most treasured QSL card. It is for a transatlantic 6m CW QSO in 2007 when I was running about 1W ERP. That evening 6m sounded like 20m and was filled with stateside SSB and CW signals. That was before FT8! The propagation was summer Es.

More recently, I have been mainly looking on 6m FT8 RX with the occasional TX period. I am using my FT817ND (at 2.5W out) and the V2000 vertical omni antenna fed with cheap CB coax.

Sunspots - Saturday August 4th 2018

Solar flux is 69 today and the SSN 11. A=6 and K=1.

BOTs? - NOT amateur radio

Visitor numbers to one of my other blogs suddenly shot up. Guess what, this coincided with a great increase in visits from Russia. Now, the Russians could suddenly have taken a great interest in one of my other blogs, but numbers up by five times? Suspicious.

It is some time since those with malicious intent have taken an interest in this blog. I keep a pretty close eye on all my blogs and change passwords often. If anything does slip through that looks like bots or irrelevant rubbish, it gets deleted.

Moral - my blogs are a waste of time for BOTs and those after free adverts.

Go away.

No rallies?

Maybe it is the time of year, but notifications I used to get about UK rallies seem to have stopped. Perhaps the person who did this (at the RSGB?) has stopped sending them out. As it is August and the UK weather is good, I would have expected to have been swamped. The other explanation is the person is on holiday.