AmateurRadio.com

My new UTC clock on the PC desktop

I have Friday off today and got my running around out of the way this morning, so I decided to flip the radio switch and see what was happening. I was going from band to band around 1600 UTC and there was just stations here and there most U.S stations. Then at 1700 UTC I was listening on 20m and on the Elecraft P3 the lower end of 20m came alive! From only hearing U.S stations to hearing LOTS of  European stations and at first I could not tell if it was a contest or not but it had to be.  I went to WA7BNM contest site and looked things over to see what contest it was while at the same time listening to the contest to see what the exchange was. To be honest I did not have to much luck with either, I really could not make out the exchanges and the web site was not really clear what contest this could had been. As I was attempting to ferret out the contest an old issue came back to me....UTC time! I have an app on my Iphone that gives local and UTC time but more often than not the Iphone is not close by when I need to reference UTC time. The same issue comes up when logging a contact on paper temporally until logging it on the PC. I was going to purchase the MFJ 108B dual LED clock but it was good I held off. It occurred to me to get online and search for something that was a free download on the internet!! I found a neat little program that sits on your desktop. You can resize it, move it around, when you restart your PC it comes alive in the last place it was left when you turned your PC off and best of all it's free!  Have a look at it and see what you think and by all means if you are using another program let me know what it is and I will check it out.
Mike Weir, VE9KK, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Brunswick, Canada. Contact him at [email protected].