You know it’s autumn when the tropo starts

We’ve had a busy weekend which didn’t contain too much radio. Last week was a bit of a sad one for us; we scattered my Dad’s ashes on Monday and then on Thursday we had to say goodbye to our much-loved cat, Buttons who was 16. A cat-less house was not good for us and we were ‘directed’ to visit the animal rescue centre, run by the Blue Cross at Burford. There we met and fell in love with two new cat friends, Pippi and Max, who I am pleased to say have kindly consented to come and live with us. They moved in yesterday and needless to say, much fun and time is being spent, looking after them and trying to settle them in.

When I popped out to the garden centre yesterday, I noticed some reasonable 145MHz tropo to the east, with the GB3PO repeater in Ipswich coming in better than normal on the mobile. Just before I went to bed, I saw a tweet from G0PKT on the east coast saying that he’d been working some good DX on VHF/UHF. I stopped off in the shack on the way to bed and had a quick QSO with Juergen, DL5EBS (JO31) on 432MHz. Signals were great – also, DJ6JJ was on 432.200 working Polish stations. Interestingly, I was able to detect fragments of the signals from the Polish stations.

This morning, on the drive to work, conditions were still good. On 145.650, I heard ON0WV identify very clearly a couple of times. And during our commuter ‘net’ on GB3TD (433.075) we were surprised and delighted to be joined by John, G6HKQ from Norfolk.

Tim Kirby, G4VXE, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Oxfordshire, England. Contact him at [email protected].

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