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I see that some bloggers have complained that HF propagation today was not too good. My 5W JT9-1 signal on 20m was spotted several times at reasonable strength by VK3AMA so this afternoon I thought I would see how far I could get with 1 watt.

Reception of JT9-1 signal from G4ILO using 1W to attic dipole

Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].

Larry Makoski, W2LJ, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Jersey, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

The Oseberg viking ship, 820 AD

Not so many nationalities are included in the exclusive group of countries with their own Q-code. I mean of course the QOD-code. I have never heard it used by radio amateurs, but it must have played a role some time ago in shipping.

The Q-codes date back to 1912 and were meant to be a short-hand for use in telegraphy. According to the list of Q-codes which Ralf D. Kloth (DL4TA) has on his web page, the meaning of QOD with a number added is: “Can you communicate with me in … 0 Dutch, 1 English, 2 French, 3 German, 4 Greek, 5 Italian, 6 Japanese, 7 Norwegian, 8 Russian, 9 Spanish?” As a response to the question the meaning was “I can communicate with you in …“

The reason for a separate code for Norwegian must be the historically large shipping fleet in Norway. This is still the case as graphically depicted in this overview of the Top 20 Ship Owning Countries, where we seem to rank as number seven – so QOD7 is appropriate!

But today all of them will QOD1.

Image from Wikipedia, user Karamell

Sverre Holm, LA3ZA, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Norway. Contact him at [email protected].

Now from the sixth hour darkness fell upon all the land until the ninth hour.

About the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”  And some of those who were standing there, when they heard it, began saying, “This man is calling for Elijah.”  Immediately one of them ran, and taking a sponge, he filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed, and gave Him a drink.  But the rest of them said, “Let us see whether Elijah will come to save Him.”

And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit. And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth shook and the rocks were split. The tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection they entered the holy city and appeared to many.

Now the centurion, and those who were with him keeping guard over Jesus, when they saw the earthquake and the things that were happening, became very frightened and said, “Truly this was the Son of God!”

A very Blessed and Peace filled Good Friday to all.

Larry W2LJ

Larry Makoski, W2LJ, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Jersey, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

If you get the impression that I’m keen on K1JT’s new JT9-1 mode, you’d be right. This morning my signal (25W to an attic dipole) was spotted by Laurie VK3AKA in Australia – the longest distance I’ve been received using JT9-1 yet. A QSO must surely follow.

My signals down under were -18dB. Yes, it seems Laurie is testing some new add-on for WSJT-X that spots to Hamspots with additional info. Exciting stuff! JT9-1 is turning out to be the WSPR QSO mode that many hoped for.

Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].

Some of you may be on the AT-Sprint Yahoo group that is a place to hang out if you are an afficianado of Steve Weber's, KD1JV, QRP radio designs. After the recent re-release of his popular 2 Band, Mountain Top Rig (MTR), a thread broke out on what types of morse key operators would use with these portable QRP rigs. The results were intereresting.


Mike Crownover, AD5A, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Texas, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

This is not much to do with radio. But I know that many of you have your own websites and will probably find this of interest.

A couple of days ago I discovered that one of my websites had been hacked. Not G4ILO’s Shack, but the other one which still continues to earn us a little bit despite receiving only the barest maintenence in the last two years.

I opened one of the pages and instead of the expected content a server error message appeared. My first thought was that the hosting company had changed some setting so I fired off an urgent support ticket. They responded saying that some of my files had been “compromised”. Sure enough when I looked at one of the files there was some code I didn’t recognize. This code referred to a file that had been added which was zero length, and that was causing a 500 server error. I deleted the file and every access now caused a 404 “file not found” error. Eventually I found that the .htaccess file had been hacked and some code added which was being executed for every single file access.

The timestamp showed that the .htaccess had been modified a week ago on 19th March. Because of the web browser caching we had not noticed the error messages any earlier. Google had visited the site in that time however, and had received a server error for every page it tried to access. So now the site had dropped out of Google. Thanks a lot, hackers.

Further investigation revealed that the hackers had modified almost every .php file on the server. They had inserted some code at the beginning of every file, apparently meant to disable error reporting. They had inserted some other code into one .php file that was included in every page. However, something in what they had done had the effect of disabling PHP processing with the result that the PHP code was sent to the browser instead of being executed.

To cut a long story short, after trying to repair the hacked files individually, I decided to restore the site from the oldest backup the hosting company held. I had a little bit of luck: the oldest backup was taken on 19th March, the day of the attack, but it had run before the attack occurred so I was able to restore the site with every file as it was originally. A day later and that backup would have gone and I would have been unable to restore the site without a lot of manual work. But the damage had been done as far as Google was concerned.

If you are expecting a lesson to be learned as a result of this story, I don’t have one, other than if you want a quiet life stick to blogging, don’t try to run your own website. If you do, visit your site every day and check for changes.

I have no idea how the hacker managed to gain access to the files on my shared web server. If they did it once they could do it again. I don’t believe that my passwords were compromised as they are randomly-generated, but I changed them anyway. Altogether this episode lasted for several stressful hours – time that I would much rather have spent trying out the latest WSJT-X program.

Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].