AmateurRadio.com

Tuning around this morning, 50MHz hasn’t been massively open, but there have been some interesting signals popping up. First thing as I was drinking my first coffee, I worked IK6HIR from JN63 who came up quite nicely for a while. I6WJB was heard calling CQ DX, so I didn’t call him, but he was a decent signal.

Although I don’t use clusters much these days – especially on HF, this Es season I have been looking at dxheat.com which is a very nice web based cluster and allows me to filter everything except 50 and 70MHz spots. I noticed a 70MHz spot fly by of Martin GM6VXB on 70MHz meteor scatter. I tuned to the frequency in question and did get a short burst from him, but not enough for a QSO. Hardly surprising, given my vertical antenna.

Returning to 50MHz just before getting some chores done, I tuned around the CW end and SV5DKL (KM46) was coming through. With the small antenna, I don’t work SV, SV5 or SV9 very often from here, so dropped in a few calls. Signals were quite weak and then, in typical Es fashion peaked up to S7 or so and I was able to sneak a QSO in, which was very nice. The distance is just under 2900km, which I think is ok for the setup here (SV5DKL was doing all the work, of course)

As I frequently do, when I work someone, I tapped his callsign into Google and found that Efstathios has a very nice blog, with information about his operating and QSOs, particularly on 50MHz.