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Inspired by a tweet from PD7N this evening, I hooked up the WSPR gear to 144MHz. Although I’m only using the vertical antenna I’m pleased to have received M0DEV in IO82 – as well as being heard there too.

Haven’t seen any other traces yet….

When I popped some dry cells in the FT790 the other day, I noticed that the springs in the battery compartment were not sufficient to keep the batteries pushed together. I emailed Yaesu but they had no spares of the battery box but did point me in the direction of some companies that could help.

However reading around last night, I saw an idea which inspired me to a possible solution. Someone on a forum had put some washers in between their batteries to keep the tension in the battery box.

I didn’t have any suitable washers but this morning I headed to Homebase and had a look around. I came home armed with a couple of packs of ‘Repair washers’ which looked suitable. An initial effort of inserting the washers to ‘pack’ the batteries was unsuccessful. I then sat down with the meter to understand what was happening.

It took a few minutes but it turned out to be a corroded connection that I hadn’t spotted. I cleaned that up and put the batteries and washers back. Success!

And of course, almost to the second, my iPad pinged with an email from HiFiSSB who had a battery box that they could let me have!

So, with the exception of a bit of a sloppy mode switch, the FT790 is now exactly how I want it!

Today doesn’t seem to be a massive DX day on 28MHz. But actually it’s just as interesting, although the plots are much closer.

Some of the distances of stations that I’ve heard this morning – between 300 and 600km would normally be in the 28MHz skip zone. In the days when I used to see how many countries I could work each year, countries like PA, ON and GW were hard going on 28MHz unless you found some backscatter.

Look at the map from this morning! The PAs, the French station just the other side of the channel, GW3LEW and yes, Julian, G4ILO! Very unusual conditions and I’m absolutely delighted to have copied Julian on his magic loft dipole.

Perhaps some Es around – certainly I was getting some big signal reports from the Ukraine this morning. It’s unlikely that any of the contacts I’ve highlighted here are ‘classic’ Es but maybe some sort of weak scatter from the layer.

I’ve seen hints of this type of propagation in the mornings a few times now, but this is the best example I’ve experienced since I began my 28MHz WSPR activity this year.

I ran the 1W WSPR system on 7MHz for a few hours this evening after 28MHz had dried up. Conditions not quite as good as Friday, but nice to see VK7DIK coming through and also to get some nice reports from the US pretty early in the evening.

Pretty good day. Nice to have a couple of spots from VK2KRR around 1200z. I can’t help but notice that Julian has beaten me on the west coast again 🙂

Power level 1W as usual.

The FT790R that I picked up from eBay arrived today. It’s always a bit of a lottery buying old kit like that. But happily, it’s essentially in good condition. It receives and transmits fine.

I’ve found two problems so far. The first is that the battery tray looks like it may have suffered some misfortune and I guess that the springs have failed as when I took the NiCad batteries out and put 8 C cells in, the batteries slide about without making contact. I’ve emailed Yaesu to see if they have a battery tray. Failing that, it may be a case of ‘packing’ the batteries with some metal spacers.

The second issue is that the mode switch was a bit loose. I’ve cleaned it up and tightened it up a bit now and it seems more reliable on USB/LSB now. When it first arrived, it was a bit intermittent on those modes.

The rig sounds great! I fired it up on SSB and listened on the FT847 and it sounds good. Same on FM – so the really important bits are sound. It has a nice feel to it. Solid, just like I remember.

Of course, for the repeaters, it has no CTCSS which has precluded too much testing on the local boxes! It does have a 1750hz tone though.

Once I sort out the battery tray, I’m looking forward to taking it out portable.

I was busy writing the PW column this morning and doing some other work on the computer, so I didn’t set the 28MHz WSPR running until around 1330z. I was running 1W as per normal.

There are some nice west coast spots today – though they didn’t hear me – but good to have copied some W6/7s.