AmateurRadio.com

It’s been nice weather this weekend for the first time in ages. Yesterday as I was working around the house and in the garden, I put the DVAP on DCS005B and made some nice QSOs including Barry, G8SAU who was on Sheringham beach. I could easily hear the waves on the shore.

In the Win-DV setup – I noticed an APRS tab. I added my callsign, lat/lon and a comment and now when I start Win-DV, it shows the DVAP on the APRS map. Quite fun! I don’t have the nice, but expensive, GPS microphone for the E-92.

This morning, I decided to go and see my Mum, in Cheltenham. I took with me one of the Kenwood APRS handhelds which I have on loan. Cheltenham is well served by a couple of great APRS digis so I wondered what would happen. Sure enough my position was digipeated which was fun to see. It was also interesting to see APRS packets from the Severn Beach rescue boat being digipeated.

On the way back home, I operated 145MHz simplex. It was interesting to hear some SOTA activity from the Long Mynd (2Q0YYY/P) as well was Walbury Hill (MQ6BQA/P – who I had a brief contact with). Also a nice QSO with 2E0ZVR between Evesham and Pershore as I climbed over the Cotswolds to Stow on the Wold.

Later on this afternoon, I thought I’d check 50MHz and was pleased to work LZ2DF at over 2180km. Pete, 2E0SQL heard an SV9 and I heard a YU in KN00 – so some good distances around today. Looks like there were some 70MHz contacts to be had too!