Sunspots - Wednesday July 15th 2020

Solar flux is 69 today and the SSN 0. A=11 and K=0.

East Anglian skies - NOT amateur radio

A variation of this photo has been on before. This part of the UK has few hills but big skies.

Dithering - NOT amateur radio

The English response to the Covid-19 pandemic is best summarised as "dithering". Now, I have no wish to criticise our politicians who have a thankless task, but I have a few observations.

• Politicians rarely admit to mistakes.
• We seem to make up policies "on the hoof" and weeks too late.

Sudden spike - NOT amateur radio

Just now I looked and supposedly I had more visitors than all day yesterday and it is only 0700z!

Now, it would be very nice if these were all genuine visitors, but somehow I doubt this! I shall have to check my other blogs to see if they have had similar spikes.

Yep, several of my other blogs have similar spikes, in some cases a few days ago.  Usually this is a result of hackers probing for vulnerabilities.  Go away!

10m FT8 (5W and indoor loop)

At about 0648z, I decided to go on 10m FT8. Normally I try 10m WSPR, but today I thought I'd start on FT8. So far, at 0700z, just one spot by G0LRD (26km). On 10m FT8 RX, 1 Spanish station spotted.

UPDATE 0722z:  Now spotted strongly by IZ0GIY (1529km). Another Spanish station spotted on RX.

UPDATE 1824z: 306 stations spotted on RX with best DX RM8L (4064km) in Asiatic Russia. On TX 28 spots of me (all European)

The new normal - NOT amateur radio

We have got in the habit of shopping early on Tuesday morning. I go to the local bakers and my wife does the food shopping in "geriatric hour". She never queues and has no problem with social distancing.

The photo shows the queue outside the door of our bakers just before the doors opened.

Back garden - NOT amateur radio

Earlier I mentioned that we thought our garden would look sparse this year. In fact it has been good. The photo shows another view of the back garden.

Tenner 10m transceiver

Many years ago I designed and made a simple 500mW transceiver for 10m CW. Much DX was worked with it. These days I have not used CW for a long time. It was VXO controlled and used a direct conversion receiver.

See https://sites.google.com/site/g3xbmqrp3/hf/10m_tenner

Yesterday on 10m WSPR TX

Yesterday underlined the difficulty with 10m WSPR. Overall I am surprised that people are still using WSPR on 10m. At a guess, I would say activity levels are at most 10% of those of FT8.  Most days I get spotted on 10m WSPR, but FT8 spots and QSOs are easier.

FT8 is about 10dB worse than WSPR, but it does allow real QSOs with 15 second TX periods compared with 120 seconds for WSPR. This makes FT8 better for shorter openings.

In all, 6 unique stations spotted my 10m WSPR yesterday.

East Cambs net last night

Last night we had a record number of people on the 2m FM net on 144.575MHz. There were so many people I sometimes got the order wrong! Most people were good signals here.

This net is held every Monday night and all in the area are very welcome. We normally close the net at about 8.30pm local time, although often some stay on longer to natter.