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I’ve worked Lubo (LZ1NP) in Bulgaria before; but last night he was 599 into the valley. I’ve also worked eleven other stations in this country. There seems to be a “pipeline” from here to there. I’ve heard other QRP stations here on the east coast mention the same phenomenon. They’ve got great ears over there!

All these contacts are over 5,000 miles from here; some of them are very weak but they still hear my 3 watt signal from the valley floor. I congratulate them all….

I also found openings into the Netherlands (PA4VHF) and in the southerly direction, PV8ADI in Brazil.

The Brazil logbook comes in with fifteen contacts. The Netherlands comes in with seven contacts. Despite my success with some of these DX stations, I still feel an excitement every time I work a new one.

Not much is going on here. A lot of non radio issues. I made only 3 qso last week. I saw this very nice low profile video by NG9D, so I wanted to share this with you. Very nice, isn't it?

I worked a new station in Sweden this morning on the 15 meter band. Rune (SM5COP) was my fourth contact into this country and doing a fine job into this valley; something not unexpected with this antenna array. I always enjoy a new contact and this one was in the mid-morning “sunlight” hours.

He’s using a TenTec Orion for his station and we talked briefly about the weather. This was an actual QSO instead of the usual 559 exchange.

I’m still enjoying some “early morning” contacts also. By this I mean “after midnight”. Recently I’ve worked EA6NB and EA7AJR in Spain and also DL4NAC in Germany.

I’m looking forward this the cool fall weather season. It makes me want to get out and do some outdoor operating. I plan to do so soon….

It’s always nice to find a new website where someone’s interested in the same sorts of things that you’re interested in. Yesterday, I saw a tweet go by, linking to Ivo, I6IBE’s site– where he was recovering DSTAR text data using a program and a RTLSDR dongle. I haven’t tried that yet.

However, looking around Ivo’s site, which is in his mother tongue, Italian I found lots of interesting things. Unfortunately, my Italian is very basic, so I was pleased to use the auto translate features of Chrome to turn the site into English. It’s a real joy of the internet that language ceases to be a barrier, in a context like this.

I was intrigued by a posting about TV-SHARP which is a program based on ADSBSharp, to be used with an RTLSDR dongle, which will decode PAL and NTSC TV signals. Note that the program only works with Analogue TV signals.

I was interested in the program for a couple of reasons. Firstly, during the Es season, it should be possible to use the program to receive any Band I TV that is still around. Secondly, if you are in range of an amateur TV repeater, it can be used to receive those signals.

Because the RTLSDR dongle can only deal with a 2Mb bandwidth, you cannot receive full colour signals, but it appears that you can receive black and white signals. You can see some example’s on I6IBE’s site.

The closest ATV repeater to me here appears to be on Dunstable Downs. I am not sure how well at 50/144/432MHz collinear will work on 1318MHz! I will give it a go though. If anyone else is in range of a ATV repeater and feels like trying this, I’ll be interested to hear how you get on.

You can download TV-Sharp here

On the first day of autumn, we were treated to some nice VHF/UHF tropo. I was alerted to it on Twitter, by Rob, MW0DNK saying that he was going portable and then later on, saying that he had worked some nice DX from Anglesey on 144/432MHz.

Driving home from the station, on 145.650, when GB3WH was not transmitting, I heard a French repeater in Limoges, JN05. Not bad, considering I was only using the Moonraker MD-7400 antenna in 1/4 wave configuration.

Once I was home, I had a quick look on 432MHz and heard John G3WZT calling CQ on CW on 432.200. To my surprise, I was able to hear DL5MAE come back to him. I waited for the QSO to finish and then called DL5MAE a couple of khz higher than their QSO frequency. Often this doesn’t work, but this time it did! I was thrilled to work Wolfgang, who was one of my 144MHz meteor scatter pals back in the 1980s – a nice distance to JN58.

Other stations popped up on 432Mhz during the evening, a couple of DLs, LX1DB, who I didn’t manage to work and French station in JN27. Closer to home I worked F5MFO in JN19, also on CW.

I’m not on 144MHz CW.SSB currently, but I listened on FM, where there were lots of French voices and some repeaters from interesting locations coming through. Listening on 145.725, there was a particularly loud signal. I was just scanning the French repeater list to see what it was likely to be, when it IDed on CW; HB9G!

OK! I waited for the QSO to finish, turned my CTCSS off, so as to try and avoid bringing closer repeaters and called F6BPZ. I think Jean was surprised to be called by a G station and I was surprised that he heard me! We had a pleasant, brief QSO, before the repeater dived in fading, though it came up again later.

Although this morning dawned foggy and there is some good enhancement on UK signals, I’ve not heard anything more distant so far.

This is how we need to talk up amateur radio.

This is an article I wrote for LIMARC here on Long Island, and also posted at my blog Fofio!.  Some of it is targeted to beginners in the hobby, so I apologize for the elementary nature of some of it.  Many of the kit references can also be found at my list of radio-related kits RadioKitGuide.com

I have been slowly getting into QRP these days (low-power for you beginners).  Being an outdoorsy kind of guy, it mixes well with my outings.  What has really surprised me lately though, is how well you can do with some inexpensive equipment, and a simple antenna.

Most of my portable setup is relatively Read the rest of this post