AmateurRadio.com

Late in the afternoon today, I decided to drive down to the hamlet of Duxford a mile or so from where we live. There’s a nice peaceful part of the River Thames there which I enjoy a walk around.

As I was descending the hill towards the river, I had the Anytone rig running on 29.010MHz AM when I heard a weak ‘W0TDH testing’. I dropped my call in and was totally surprised when I got a response.

Tom’s in the mountains of North Carolina and we had a nice QSO, despite my comparatively weak signal there. Good ears, Tom – thank you.

After I finished my walk and I returned home, I looked up Tom on QRZ.com – he’s got some lovely looking vintage equipment. We swapped emails and Tom said it was a while since he’d heard any mobiles coming through.

AM QSO number 3 and the best DX so far!

Paul G4DCV posted another video that he took at the recent RSGB Convention. This time, it is the excellent presentation from Liviu, YO4FNG. Although it is titled ‘4300 km on 144MHz’, it tells the story of how he evolved his VHF station in Romania.

It is full of fascinating stories, charm and gentle humour and I thoroughly recommend it to you.

Thanks again to Paul G4DCV for the excellent video production.

See the video here

The only trouble with my very portable satellite setup, consisting of the UV-5R handheld and the Elk yagi is that if the weather is less clement, the prospect of venturing out to make satellite contacts is somewhat less attractive!

Today was sunny if a little cool and once I’d finished my chores, I decided to see what was happening on SO-50. The first pass was well to the East of me, with plenty of activity but few contacts being made. I was more optimistic about the next pass, which was almost overhead here. I was pleased to work PA4MRS/P with a nice easy contact and scraped a quick one with an S56 station over in JN76. My final pass yielded a very nice contact with ES6DO. Just as the satellite faded, I’m pretty sure I heard a Norwegian station.

Good to make some interesting contacts. I suppose making some satellite contacts when there’s snow on the ground will prove my enthusiasm!

I set the 472khz WSPR running last night in the middle of the evening, wondering what I might hear. Earlier in th e day, Colin, G6AVK had noted on Twitter that he had heard his first North American of the season on 472KHz the night before. With my untuned aerial I didn’t think that such DX was likely to be in my grasp.

However, by the time I went to bed, I was very pleased to discover that I had heard two new (to me) German stations; DC0DX and DK6NI,

When I got up this morning and checked what the system had heard, I was staggered to find several spots of WE2XGR/6 in FN12. My first North American copy on 472khz.

I reiterate that this is all down to the guys at the other end! I am using completely unmodified gear, so with any luck, if you decide to try it, you will do at least as well as me.

One of the talks that I would really like to have seen at the RSGB Convention the other week was Lyn, GW8JLY speaking about Meteor Scatter for Beginners.

I was delighted to see, earlier in the week, that Paul G4DCV had filmed the talk. I’ve just thoroughly enjoyed watching it on a rather wet lunchtime here in London when I didn’t fancy going out for a walk.

The talk was interesting and it was good to see Lyn GW8JLY speaking. Although we have worked very many times on VHF over the years, I don’t think we have ever met and it is always nice to finalise the mental picture of the person at the other end of the QSO!

Thanks to Lyn for the excellent talk and to Paul, G4DCV for putting together an excellent video presentation.

See the talk here

Over the last week or two, I have been running my 472khz WSPR receiver to see what I could ‘catch’. As you may remember, this is all very simple – the unmodified FT-847 connected up to an untuned Butternut vertical! However it seems to work at least a little!

Some new stations received over the last week or so have been

DK7FC
OR7T
G3XIZ
F4DTL
F5WK
EI0CF
DG3LV

Propagation varies quite heavily from day to day. Some days I hear only a couple of G stations and other days, I hear the more distant DL stations.

If you’ve not tried, I really recommend that you have a listen!

The old timers reading this are going to be laughing I think!

Ten metres was in good shape today and I’d just finished some programming work on the Anytone rig in the car. I tuned up around 29MHz to see if there was any AM coming through. Sure enough there was.

Barry N1EU was coming through nicely, running an Apache labs SDR which was sounding great. Barry was kind enough to pull my 10W/whip signal out and give me an S5.

Really thrilled to have made my second AM QSO! Hopefully there are more to come.