Sunspots - Wednesday August 5th

 Solar flux is 118 and the SSN 100. A=10 and K=0.

Blackberries from OUR garden

 

Last night I collected blackberries from OUR garden which we will have for breakfast.

Healthy breakfast

At this time of year, I like to pick the wild blackberries not far from our house up the lane. 

We usually have a cooked breakfast a couple of days a week.

PC issue?

My shack PC (an Asus) runs Windows 10 with updates turned off. My internet provider provides free security so I thought this would not matter. I also have Windows Defender and CCleaner. The PC is only really used for WSJT-X. I browse and email on a Chromebook in the lounge or on my iPhone SE.

Of late it seems to have developed memory faults and tries to reference memory locations it cannot find. It looks like my hard drive is failing.

Apart from moving to Linux, any suggestions please?

Pansies

 

My son is rightly proud of his pansies grown from seed. 

They look stunning.

10m 200mW WSPR (Tuesday)

My beacon was turned on at about 0618z. 

UPDATE 1707z:  5 stations spotting me. These are probably Es.

ZachTek WSPR beacon

As you may recall, I have used my ZachTek WSPR beacon most days (and some nights!) on 10m and I have been very pleased with it. 

I just connect power and antenna and the device does the rest. No PC is needed. GPS works out the locator and it defaults to 200mW although this can be changed in software e.g. if you use attenuators or have a lossy coax.

The end of AM broadcasting?

There seems to be a move to close the remaining longwave and mediumwave AM transmitters. 

The BBC recently closed Radio 4 on 198kHz longwave and there are fewer and fewer stations remaining on longwave and medium wave AM. 

In the end I can see a day coming when all broadcasting is via the internet and not "over the air". 

I would not be surprised if we see the end of linear broadcasting completely. Instead people would watch what they want when they want whether radio or TV.  The danger is if we ever lose the internet we lose all broadcasting. This could be hacking or just a fault.

Sunspots - Tuesday August 4th

 Solar flux is 126 and the SSN 104. A=19 and K=4,

Written in 2014!!!

Way back in 2014 I wrote this on Facebook. Nothing changes sadly.