Sunspots - Tuesday June 16th 2020

Solar flux is 70 and the SSN 11. A=4 and K=1. The sunspot number is still not zero, which may be a good sign.

10m WSPR TX (500mW to the tiny indoor loop antenna)

At about 1300z the 10m WSPR beacon was turned on.  No spots yet.

UPDATE 1630z:  No spots.

UPDATE 1802z:   Spotted in Italy and Switzerland.

UPDATE 2020z:   QRT. In all, 4 unique stations have spotted  me.

Recent lockdown walk - NOT amateur radio

On Friday we did a nice walk around the village of Reach. The photo shows what we saw.

Hepburn tropo forecasts

This is a resource that I rarely use, but it looks useful for looking ahead at VHF tropo conditions.

See http://www.dxinfocentre.com/tropo_eur.html

Online 2m FT8 screen-grab

A station near Cambridge, G0LRD, has a very useful screen-grab of 2m FT8 activity as seen at his QTH. I find it useful to check my signal is clean and as expected. He gets me strongly. He seems to see very similar stations to me.

I still find 2m FT8 amazing. My low ERP signal seems to get spotted far and wide irrespective of conditions. I am convinced these are not aircraft reflections as these sort of ranges seem possible at any time even with low ERP. It is so easy that I hardly bother these days.

Soon, I think I should try harder on 70cm FT8 to see what is possible.

See http://82.71.9.63:8080/cap/

What is this? - NOT amateur radio

On our walk yesterday we saw this plant. It looks like a dandelion but is about twice as big.  Any help greatly appreciated.

2 weeks on 10m WSPR TX (500mW to indoor loop)

This surprised me!

I did not expect many to be on 10m WSPR and I was even more surprised how well the indoor loop performs.

In all, 51 stations have spotted me so far in the last 2 weeks on 10m WSPR, despite the 500mW and the indoor tiny loop.

The beauty of 10m WSPR is that I can run this totally separate from the PC using the WSPR beacon TX which is about the size of a pack of playing cards and was designed by W5OLF. It has given me years of great service.

This means I can run 10m WSPR "in the background" whilst going in 6m or 2m FT8 at the same time.

East Cambs net

Every Monday at 1900z (8pm BST) we meet on 144.575MHz vertical FM in the all modes section of 2m for the East Cambs net. Anyone in the area is very welcome. The oldest is 96 but I do not know the age of the youngest!

Gin and tonic - NOT amateur radio

At about 9pm UK local time yesterday I sat out in the back garden with a gin and tonic. Another week or so and the days will start to get shorter again. Yesterday was warm and sunny.

Sunspot going?

The only sunspot on the side of the Sun facing us looks like it is rotating out of view. When I looked last night it was still there, but about to disappear. Unless there are others rotating into view or others bubbling up, we could be in for a quiet few weeks.