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Thursday, March 31, 2016
- Slow time on the bands.
I took an extra few days off over the Easter weekend with the intention of getting some solid radio time in. As it turned out the only day I had was yesterday afternoon most likely because I knew my vacation was coming to an end and the plan was to get on the rig! I was planning on doing some JT-65 as with the solar conditions not so great and my 5 watts signal to boot it seemed to be the logical move. Before getting on the radio I looked up a website called Band conditions. This is a very nice site that gives you up to date band conditions via nice easy to read bar type graphs. Each HF band is displayed and is update automatically every 30 seconds. There is an arrow for each band graph that is either in the Red, Yellow or green portion of the bar graph……you can guess what color means what. Seeing that 20m and 30m seemed to be the go to bands I booted up WSJT-X and ended up finding 30m not so great but 20m was booming with lots of European stations. Unfortunately my calling CQ was not being answered. I did check with PSK reporter and my signal was being spotted all over the U.S as well as some places in Europe. I then closed down WSJT-X and opened Fldigi and now the plan was to give PSK 31 a whirl on 20m. I was not disappointed as there was lots of signals in the waterfall. After spending about 45 min's on the band I only was able to get the attention of one Spanish station to hear my QRP signal……BUT conditions seemed to change and we never completed the QSO. One thing I took away from the time on the radio is that I have to review what PSK-31 macro's and simplify some and rename some of the buttons to make them more user friendly to me.
- The Spectrum Monitor — April, 2016
Stories you'll find in our April, 2016 issue: Let Portable Antennas give you a Noise-Free Vacation By Keith Baker KB1SF/VA3KSF An increasing cacophony of mostly man-made RF noise on our HF bands makes it ever more difficult to hear particularly weak incoming stations, sometimes to the point of making reception of favorite shortwave or ham […]
- Portable Ops 11 & 12: Two New States and 2 x QRP!
This post is a two-fer, I didn't get a chance to write up #11 portable operations, so I just decided to combine them. Do you ever have one of those QSO's where everything seems to go wrong?? I did when I worked WB3GCK. Right now I don't hav...
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